Page:A Study of Fairy Tales.djvu/163

Rh emotional, artistic, and physical action. The simplest kindergarten plays, such as The Farmer, The Blacksmith, and Little Travelers, naturally lead into playing a story such as The Sheep and the Pig or The Gingerbread Man. The Mouse that Lost Her Tail and The Old Woman and Her Pig are delightful simple plays given in Chain Stories and Playlets by Mara Chadwick and E. Gray Freeman, suited to the kindergarten to play or the first grade to read and play. Working out a complete dramatization of a folk-tale such as Sleeping Beauty, in the first grade, and having the children come into the kindergarten and there play it for them, will be a great incentive toward catching the spirit of imaginatively entering into a situation which you are not. This is the essential for dramatization. Johnny Cake is a good tale to be played in the kindergarten because it uses a great number of children. As the kindergarten room generally is large, it enables the children who represent the man, the woman, the little boy, etc., to station themselves at some distance.

There are some dangers in dramatization which are to be avoided:—

(1) Dramatization often is in very poor form. The result is not the important thing, but the process. And sometimes teachers have understood this to mean, "Hands off!" and left the children to their crude impulses, unaided and unimproved. When the child shows what he is trying to do the teacher may show him how he can do what he wants to do. By suggestion