These two principles, simplicity and continuity, apply concretely to sentence and phrase structure as well. The effort to obtain continuity for the child explains the colloquial "The little boy who lived in this house, _he_ did so and so----" You help your child back to the subject, "the little boy" by the grammatically redundant "he" after his mind has gone off on "this house." This same need for continuity also explains why a child's own stories are characteristically one continuous sentence strung together with "ands" and "thens" and "buts." He sees and hears and consequently thinks in a simple, rhythmic, continuous flow. If we would have him see and hear and think with us, we must give him his stories and verse in simple units closely and obviously linked together.
But after all is said and done, why should we give children stories at all? Is it to instruct and so should we pay attention to the content? Is it to delight and so should we pay attention to the form? Both things, information and relish, have their place in justifying stories for children. But both to my mind are of minor importance compared to a third and quite different thing,--and this is 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.