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