to get children to create
stories of their own, to play with words. "To get" is an unhappy phrase
for it suggests that children must be coaxed to the task. This I do not
believe though I cannot prove it. I do believe that children play with
words naturally and spontaneously just as they play with any material
that comes to their creative hands. And further I believe,--though this
too I cannot prove,--that we adults kill this play with words just as we
kill their creative play with most things. Most of us have forgotten how
to play with anything, most of all with words. We are utilitarian, we
are executive, we are didactic, we are earth-tied, we are hopelessly
adult! Actually children use their ears and noses and fingers much more
than do we adults. Our stories rely mainly upon visual recalls. We
forget to listen even to birds whose message is pure melody. And how
many of us _hear_ the city sounds which surround us, the characteristic
whirr of revolving wheels, the vibrating rhythm of horses' feet, the
crunch of footsteps in the snow? Noises we hear, the warning shriek of
the fire engine or the honk! honk! of the automobile. But the subtler,
finer reverberations we are not sensitive to. Yet little children love
to listen and develop another method of sensing and appreciating their
world by this pleasurable use of their hearing. It surely is an unused
opportunity for story-tellers. I have tried to use it in "Pedro's Feet"
which is an attempt to give them an ordinary story by means of sounds.
And even less than to city sounds do we listen for the cadences in
language. We listen only for the _meaning_ and forget the sensuous
delight of sound.

But happily children are not so determined to wring a meaning out of
every sight and every sound. Children play. Play is a child's own
technique. Through it he seizes the strange unknown world around him and
fashions it into his very own. He recreates through play. And through
creating, he learns and he enjoys.

There is no better play material in the world than words. They surround
us, go with us through our work-a-day tasks, their sound is always in
our ears, their rhythms on our tongue. Why do we leave it to special
occasions and to special people to use these common things as precious
play material? Because we are grown-ups and have closed our ears and our
eyes that we may not be distracted from our plodding ways! But when we
turn to the children, to hearing and seeing children,