In the example cited above, both the establishment of the personal relation and the placing of the story in a concrete situation, were managed partly at the one stroke.  Your best help to furnish a concrete situation will be to preserve at the one end a sympathy for the 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.

Every story told results in some return from the child.  The teacher, in her presentation, must conceive the child’s aim in listening.  This does not mean that she forces her aim upon him.  But it does mean that she makes a mental list of the child’s own possible problems that the tale is best suited to originate, one of which the child himself will suggest.  For the return should originate, not in imitation of what the teller plans, but spontaneously, as the child’s own plan, answering to some felt need of his.  But that does not prevent the story-teller from using her own imagination, and through it, from realizing what opportunities for growth the story presents, and what possible activities ought to be stimulated.  A good guide will keep ahead of the children, know the possibilities of the material, and by knowledge and suggestion lead them to realize and accomplish the plans they crudely conceive.  A consideration of these plans will modify the telling of the tale, and should be definitely thought about before the telling of the tale.  A story told definitely to stimulate in the children dramatization, will emphasize action and dialogue; while one told to stimulate the painting of a water-color sketch, will emphasize the setting of the tale.