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.
