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full motor expression to his thought for the art of abbreviation he has not yet learned. It is not enough to recognize that since a child attends to but one thing at a time the units must be simple. Here in the form as in the content, must the motor quality of a child's thinking be held constantly in mind. In trying to find the general subject matter appropriate for little children I said that they think through their muscles. This motor expression of small children has its direct application in the concrete method of telling of any happening. The story child who is experiencing, should go through the essential muscular performances which the real listening child would go through if he were actually experiencing himself. For he thinks through these muscular expressions. As an example, when a group of four-year-olds heard a story about a little boy who saw the elevated train approach and pass above him, they thought the child might have been run over. The words "up" and "above" and "overhead" had been used but the children failed to get the idea of "upness." Unquestionably they would have understood if I had made the little boy _throw back his head and look up_. Small children act with big gestures and with big muscles. And they think through the same mechanisms. These two principles, simplicity and continuity, apply concretely to sentence and phrase structure as well. The effort to obtain continuity for the child explains the colloquial "The little boy who lived in this house, _he_ did so and so----" You help your child back to the subject, "the little boy" by the grammatically redundant "he" after his mind has gone off on "this house." This same need for continuity also explains why a child's own stories are characteristically one continuous sentence strung together with "ands" and "thens" and "buts." He sees and hears and consequently thinks in a simple, rhythmic, continuous flow. If we would have him see and hear and think with us, we must give him his stories and verse in simple units closely and obviously linked together. But after all is said and done, why should we give children stories at all? Is it to instruct and so should we pay attention to the content? Is it to delight and so should we pay attention to the form? Both things, information and relish, have their place in justifying stories for children. But both to my mind are of minor importance compared to a third and quite different thing,--and this is
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