"Once a long, long time ago there was no one living on this earth that is now so full of people.
"There were no living things at all here: no cattle, no wild beasts, no birds, no butterflies or insects of any kind and no fishes in the sea.
"Before that there were no green growing things here; no grass, no trees, no flowers.
"In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth.
"In the beginning was a time so long ago that no one knows when it was."
How much better is this way of beginning the story of creation from what the child has experienced of created objects than to begin with non existence and chaos. Few of us realize how many terms that are commonplaces with us mean nothing to the child. Particularly is this true of terms used in the Bible and descriptive of things familiar in the primitive orient but little known in the modern occident, such as altar, sacrifice, tabernacle, caravan, to name but a few.
=Avoid formal definition.= But at this point a word of caution is necessary against a too pedantic application of this principle of defining the terms that are used in the child's instruction. For example one book of Bible stories for young children prefixes to the story of creation a vocabulary which includes explanations of such words as ground, dark, light, sky, under, above, good, rest. But it must be apparent that a child who cannot without previous explanations understand such simple words as these is not in a position to profit by instruction in Biblical history at all. It is possible so to overload a story with definitions that the whole thread of the narrative is lost. We must be cautious lest our pupils fail to see the forest by very reason of the trees. Ample allowance must be made for the constructive imagination of the child, which builds up its own definitions out of the material of the narrative itself. Children have always had an understanding of fairy tales without ever having had the terms fairy, witch, king and princess defined for them. When you tell a child that the king sat on a high throne with his crown on his head, his sceptre in his hand, while all the people bowed down to him, the child, though he has never seen a throne, will recognize that it is something on which kings sit, that a crown is something that a king wears on his head, a sceptre something that a king holds in his hand, and that a king is a man who is distinguished from other men and to whom they bow, a very good working definition of a king which would make quite unnecessary any elaborate attempt to define for a child the concept of royalty. In fact, formal definition should be avoided wherever possible, and the skilful teacher will know how to make a story define its own terms in the same way as the sentence that we just gave as an instance defined for the child the four unknown terms: king, throne, crown, and sceptre. Indeed the most important idea of all, that we have to give to the child cannot be defined otherwise even to ourselves, namely the idea of God. The general rule to be followed may be laid down in these words: Never define for the child any term that the story itself can be made to define but do define every necessary term that the story itself cannot be made to define. It is worth while noting in this connection that the best definition for a concrete object is the object itself or a picture of it.