the central interest, to occupy the
place of main emphasis, and if the game, occupation, and song work is
related to the child's life, this organization of the child's tale in
his life will be accomplished naturally.

In the example cited above, both the establishment of the personal
relation and the placing of the story in a concrete situation, were
managed partly at the one stroke. Your best help to furnish a concrete
situation will be to preserve at the one end a sympathy for the life
of your story and at the other to perceive the experience of the
children in the listening group. Seeing both at once will result in a
knowledge of what the children need most to make the story go home. If
your children are good enough, and you and they sufficiently good
friends to bear the fun of pantomime and the gaiety of hilarity,
asking several boys, as they walk across the room before the children,
to imitate some animals they had seen at a circus, and getting the
children to guess the animal represented until they hit upon the
elephant, would put certain children in a spirit of fun that would be
exactly the wide-awake brightness and good humor needed to receive the
story of _The Elephant's Child_. You can get children best into the
story-telling mood by calling up ideas in line with the story. In the
case of the story cited above, under the establishment of the personal
relation, the story, _The Bremen Town Musicians_, was related to the
child's experience by a few questions concerning kinds of music he
knew, and what musician and kind of music the kindergarten had. In
telling Andersen's _Tin Soldier_ you must call up experience
concerning a soldier, not only because of the relation of the toy to
the real soldier, but because the underlying meaning of the tale is
courage, and the emotional theme is steadfastness. And to preserve the
proper unity between the tale and the telling of it, the telling must
center itself in harmony with the message of the tale, its one
dominant impression and its one dominant mood.

Every story told results in some return from the child. The teacher,
in her presentation, must _conceive the child's aim in listening_.
This does not mean that she forces her aim upon him. But it does mean
that she makes a mental list of the child's own possible problems that
the tale is best suited to originate, one of which the child himself
will suggest. For the return should originate, not in imitation of
what the tel