How To Tell Children Stories | Page 9

relief, a familiar restful feeling in the atmosphere; and then, at
last, I knew that my audience was "with me," that they and I were
interacting without obstruction. Absolutely quiet, entirely unconscious
of themselves, the boys and girls were responding to every turn of the
narrative as easily and readily as any group of story-bred kindergarten
children. From then on we had a good time together.
The process which took place in that small audience was a condensed
example of what one may expect in habitual story-telling to a group of
children. Once having had the attention chained by crude force of
interest, the children begin to expect something interesting from the
teacher, and to wait for it. And having been led step by step from one
grade of a logical sequence to another, their minds-- at first beguiled by
the fascination of the steps --glide into the habit of following any
logical sequence. My club formed its habit, as far as I was concerned,
all in one session; the ordinary demands of school procedure lengthen
the process, but the result is equally sure. By the end of a week in
which the children have listened happily to a story every day, the habit
of listening and deducing has been formed, and the expectation of

pleasantness is connected with the opening of the teacher's lips.
These two benefits are well worth the trouble they cost, and for these
two, at least, any teacher who tells a story well may confidently look--
the quick gaining of a confidential relation with the children, and the
gradual development of concentration and interested attention in them.
These are direct and somewhat clearly discernible results, comfortably
placed in a near future. There are other aims, reaching on into the far,
slow modes of psychological growth, which must equally determine the
choice of the story-teller's material and inform the spirit of her work.
These other, less immediately attainable ends, I wish now to consider
in relation to the different types of story by which they are severally
best served.
First, unbidden claimant of attention, comes
THE FAIRY STORY
No one can think of a child and a story, without thinking of the fairy
tale. Is this, as some would have us believe, a bad habit of an ignorant
old world? Or can the Fairy Tale justify her popularity with truly
edifying and educational results? Is she a proper person to introduce
here, and what are her titles to merit?
Oh dear, yes! Dame Fairy Tale comes bearing a magic wand in her
wrinkled old fingers, with one wave of which she summons up that
very spirit of joy which it is our chief effort to invoke. She raps smartly
on the door, and open sesames echo to every imagination. Her red-
heeled shoes twinkle down an endless lane of adventures, and every
real child's footsteps quicken after. She is the natural, own great-
grandmother of every child in the world, and her pocketfuls of treasures
are his by right of inheritance. Shut her out, and you truly rob the
children of something which is theirs; something marking their
constant kinship with the race-children of the past, and adapted to their
needs as it was to those of the generation of long ago! If there were no
other criterion at all, it would be enough that the children love the fairy
tale; we give them fairy stories, first, because they like them. But that

by no means lessens the importance of the fact that fairy tales are also
good for them.
How good? In various ways. First, perhaps, in their supreme power of
presenting truth through the guise of images. This is the way the
race-child took toward wisdom, and it is the way each child's individual
instinct takes, after him. Elemental truths of moral law and general
types of human experience are presented in the fairy tale, in the poetry
of their images, and although the child is aware only of the image at the
time, the truth enters with it and becomes a part of his individual
experience, to be recognised in its relations at a later stage. Every truth
and type so given broadens and deepens the capacity of the child's inner
life, and adds an element to the store from which he draws his moral
inferences.
The most familiar instance of a moral truth conveyed under a
fairy-story image is probably the story of the pure-hearted and loving
girl whose lips were touched with the wonderful power of dropping
jewels with every spoken word, while her stepsister, whose heart was
infested with malice and evil desires, let ugly toads fall from her mouth
whenever she spoke. I mention the old tale because there is probably no
one of my readers who has not heard it