Children's Stories and Tips on Telling Them

Just to let everyone know, I am part native american and the history
of my native relatives has long been passed from one generation to
another through the telling of stories. The eldest members of the
tribes would sit and tell their stories to the young for hours. It was
not just a history lesson, nor a mere bedtime fable. Ingrained in these
stories were teachings of how my relatives lived, loved, fought and died.
I still enjoy listening to senior members of my family telling their memories
of childhood and the traits that they were brought up to respect and even
revere. Respect and honor seemed to be the main themes of many of these
stories and it makes me sad to see the days of story telling being eaten
up by the drive and demand of our parents time in order to make ends meet.
The search for the ultimate job or business, the reach for wealth and power,
these things are slowly stealing away our basic lives and the things
we 'should' hold so dear. The time spent with our children is short and
ever so precious, why we would trade that for a bigger house or newer
car is beyond me, but unfortunately, that is what society has ingrained
into us in order to call ourselves successful. I began thinking about what
I have given up over the years and it came to me, time spent with my
children and being able to tell them stories like my grandparents did.
So, as a tribute to my grandparents, I will be posting a series of
Storytelling blogs and even some great old stories that you may
want to tell to your children, while you still have time.

Not long ago, I chanced to open a magazine at a story of Italian life
which dealt with a curious popular custom. It told of the love of the
people for the performances of a strangely clad, periodically appearing
old man who was a professional story-teller. This old man repeated whole
cycles of myth and serials of popular history, holding his
audience-chamber in whatever corner of the open court or square he
happened upon, and always surrounded by an eager crowd of listeners. So
great was the respect in which the story-teller was held, that any
interruption was likely to be resented with violence.

As I read of the absorbed silence and the changing expressions of the
crowd about the old man, I was suddenly reminded of a company of people I
had recently seen. They were gathered in one of the parlors of a women's
college, and their serious young faces had, habitually, none of the
childlike responsiveness of the Italian populace; they were suggestive,
rather, of a daily experience which precluded over-much surprise or
curiosity about anything. In the midst of the group stood a frail-looking
woman with bright eyes. She was telling a story, a children's story, about
a good and a bad little mouse.

She had been asked to do that thing, for a purpose, and she did it,
therefore. But it was easy to see from the expressions of the listeners
how trivial a thing it seemed to them.

That was at first. But presently the room grew quieter; and yet quieter.
The faces relaxed into amused smiles, sobered in unconscious sympathy,
finally broke in ripples of mirth. The story-teller had come to her own.

The memory of the college girls listening to the mouse-story brought other
memories with it. Many a swift composite view of faces passed before my
mental vision, faces with the child's look on them, yet not the faces of
children. And of the occasions to which the faces belonged, those were
most vivid which were earliest in my experience. For it was those early
experiences which first made me realize the modern possibilities of the
old, old art of telling stories.

It had become a part of my work, some years ago, to give English lectures
on German literature. Many of the members of my class were unable to read
in the original the works with which I dealt, and as these were modern
works it was rarely possible to obtain translations. For this reason, I
gradually formed the habit of telling the story of the drama or novel in
question before passing to a detailed consideration of it. I enjoyed this
part of the lesson exceedingly, but it was some time before I realized how
much the larger part of the lesson it had become to the class. They
used--and they were mature women--to wait for the story as if it were a
sugarplum and they, children; and to grieve openly if it were omitted.
Substitution of reading from a translation was greeted with precisely the
same abatement of eagerness that a child shows when he has asked you to
tell a story, and you offer, instead, to "read one from the pretty book."
And so general and constant were the tokens of enjoyment that there could
ultimately be no doubt of the power which the mere story-telling exerted.

The attitude of the grown-up listeners did but illustrate the general
difference between the effect of telling a story and of reading one.
Everyone who knows children well has felt the difference. With few
exceptions, children listen twice as eagerly to a story told as to one
read, and even a "recitation" or a so-called "reading" has not the charm
for them that the person wields who can "tell a story." And there are
sound reasons for their preference.

The great difference, including lesser ones, between telling and reading
is that the teller is free; the reader is bound. The book in hand, or the
wording of it in mind, binds the reader. The story-teller is bound by
nothing; he stands or sits, free to watch his audience, free to follow or
lead every changing mood, free to use body, eyes, voice, as aids in
expression. Even his mind is unbound, because he lets the story come in
the words of the moment, being so full of what he has to say. For this
reason, a story told is more spontaneous than one read, however well read.
And, consequently, the connection with the audience is closer, more
electric, than is possible when the book or its wording intervenes.

Beyond this advantage, is the added charm of the personal element in
story-telling. When you make a story your own and tell it, the listener
gets the story, plus your appreciation of it. It comes to him filtered
through your own enjoyment. That is what makes the funny story thrice
funnier on the lips of a jolly raconteur than in the pages of a memoir. It
is the filter of personality. Everybody has something of the curiosity of
the primitive man concerning his neighbor; what another has in his own
person felt and done has an especial hold on each one of us. The most
cultured of audiences will listen to the personal reminiscences of an
explorer with a different tingle of interest from that which it feels for
a scientific lecture on the results of the exploration. The longing for
the personal in experience is a very human longing. And this instinct or
longing is especially strong in children. It finds expression in their
delight in tales of what father or mother did when they were little, of
what happened to grandmother when she went on a journey, and so on, but it
also extends to stories which are not in themselves personal: which take
their personal savor merely from the fact that they flow from the lips in
spontaneous, homely phrases, with an appreciative gusto which suggests
participation.

The greater ease in holding the attention of children is, for teachers, a
sufficient practical reason for telling stories rather than reading them.
It is incomparably easier to make the necessary exertion of "magnetism,"
or whatever it may be called, when nothing else distracts the attention.
One's eyes meet the children's gaze naturally and constantly; one's
expression responds to and initiates theirs without effort; the connection
is immediate. For the ease of the teacher, then, no less than for the joy
of the children, may the art of story-telling be urged as pre-eminent over
the art of reading.

It is a very old, a very beautiful art. Merely to think of it carries
one's imaginary vision to scenes of glorious and touching antiquity. The
tellers of the stories of which Homer's Iliad was compounded; the
transmitters of the legend and history which make up the Gesta
Romanorum; the traveling raconteurs whose brief heroic tales are woven
into our own national epic; the grannies of age-old tradition whose
stories are parts of Celtic folk-lore, of Germanic myth, of Asiatic
wonder-tales,--these are but younger brothers and sisters to the
generations of story-tellers whose inventions are but vaguely outlined in
resultant forms of ancient literatures, and the names of whose tribes are
no longer even guessed. There was a time when story-telling was the
chiefest of the arts of entertainment; kings and warriors could ask for
nothing better; serfs and children were satisfied with nothing less. In
all times there have been occasional revivals of this pastime, and in no
time has the art died out in the simple human realms of which mothers are
queens. But perhaps never, since the really old days, has story-telling so
nearly reached a recognized level of dignity as a legitimate and general
art of entertainment as now.

Its present popularity seems in a way to be an outgrowth of the
recognition of its educational value which was given impetus by the German
pedagogues of Froebel's school. That recognition has, at all events, been
a noticeable factor in educational conferences of late. The function of
the story is no longer considered solely in the light of its place in the
kindergarten; it is being sought in the first, the second, and indeed in
every standard where the children are still children. Sometimes the demand
for stories is made solely in the interests of literary culture, sometimes
in far ampler and vaguer relations, ranging from inculcation of scientific
fact to admonition of moral theory; but whatever the reason given, the
conclusion is the same: tell the children stories.

The average teacher has yielded to the pressure, at least in theory.
Cheerfully, as she has already accepted so many modifications of old
methods by "new thought," she accepts the idea of instilling mental and
moral desiderata into the receptive pupil, viâ the charming tale. But,
confronted with the concrete problem of what desideratum by which tale,
and how, the average teacher sometimes finds her cheerfulness displaced by
a sense of inadequacy to the situation.

People who have always told stories to children, who do not know when they
began or how they do it; whose heads are stocked with the accretions of
years of fairyland-dwelling and nonsense-sharing,--these cannot understand
the perplexity of one to whom the gift and the opportunity have not "come
natural." But there are many who can understand it, personally and all
too well. To these, the teachers who have not a knack for story-telling,
who feel as shy as their own youngest scholar at the thought of it, who do
not know where the good stories are, or which ones are easy to tell, it is
my earnest hope that the following pages will bring something definite and
practical in the way of suggestion and reference.