Page:A Study of Fairy Tales.djvu/154

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A STUDY OF FAIRY TALES

re-telling, children would like to make a clay porridge-pot, which could be there before them in the re-telling. Perhaps they would make the rice porridge also, and put some in the pot, for little children are very fond of making things to eat, and domestic science has descended even into the kindergarten. After the story of Chanticleer and Partlet, children would enjoy making a little wagon and harnessing to it a Duck, and putting in it the Cock and the Hen, little animals they have made. In the first grade, after the story of Sleeping Beauty, children would naturally take great pleasure in making things needed to play the story: the paper silver and gold crowns of the maids and Princess and the Prince's sword. After the story of Medio Pollito, we have noted with what special interest children might make a weathervane, with Little Half-Chick upon it!

(4) The instinct of artistic expression. This is the instinct of drawing, painting, paper-cutting, and crayon-sketching, the instinct of song, rhythm, dance, and game, of free play and dramatization.

(a) One form of artistic creative reaction will be the cutting of free silhouette pictures. The child should attempt this with the simplest of the stories which are suited for drawing, painting, or crayon-sketching. He loves to represent the animals he sees every day; and the art work should direct this impulse and show him how to do it so that he may draw or cut out a dog, a cat, a sheep, or a goat; or simple objects, as a broom, a barrel, a box, a table, and a chair. The Bremen Town