himself to his concrete environment. This later evolves into a sense
of relationship between other people and their concrete environment.

At first, then, a child can not transcend himself or his experiences.
Nor should he be asked to. A two-year-old's stories must be completely
his stories with his own familiar little person moving in his own
familiar background. They should vivify and deepen the sense of the
one relationship he does feel keenly,--that of himself to something
well-known. Now a two-year-old's range of experiences is not large. At
least the experiences in which he takes a real part are not many. So his
stories must be of his daily routine,--his eating, his dressing, his
activities with his toys and his home. These are the things to which he
attends: they make up his world. And they must be his very own eating
and dressing and home, and not eating and dressing and homes in general.
Stories which are not intimately his own, I believe either pass by or
strain a two-year-old; and I doubt whether many three-year-olds can
participate with pleasure and without strain in any experience which has
not been lived through in person. He may of course get pleasure from the
sound of the story apart from its meaning much earlier. Just now we are
thinking solely of the content. I well remember the struggles of my
three-year-old boy to get outside himself and view a baby chicken's
career objectively. He checked up each step in my story by this
orienting remark, "That the baby chicken in the shell, not me! The baby
chicken go scritch-scratch, not me!" Was not this an evident effort to
comprehend an extra-personal relationship?

Again just as at first a small child can not get outside himself, so he
can not get outside the immediate. At first he can not by himself recall
even a simple chronological sequence. He is still in the narrowest, most
limiting sense, too entangled in the "here" and the "now." The plot
sense emerges slowly. Indeed there is slight plot value in most
children's stories up to eight years. Plot is present in embryonic form
in the omnipresent personal drama: "Where's baby? Peek-a-boo! There she
is!" It can be faintly detected in the pleasure a child has in an actual
walk. But the pleasure he derives from the sense of completeness, the
sense that a walk or a story has a beginning and a middle and an end,
the real plot pleasure, is negligible compared with the pleasure he gets
in the action itself. Small ch