rheumatism, and her little niece, by assuming the physical actions of her aunt, was experiencing to a degree her inner state.

During the first 4 years of his life, the child is constantly interpreting his little world and experimenting with new ideas of his own. He plays train and plane; he becomes first the milkman, then a whole fire department. He plays out countless parent activities. If he has no friends to play with, he often conjures up an imaginary playmate with whom he plays happily (with no fights whatever) for days on end. Often he works hard at his play, thinking up the most ingenious devices for boats and trucks and many other things. He explores widely and puts new information to use at once.

Then comes school, which in former days brought an abrupt end to this wonderful source of fun and learning. Drama came in the door with the child, but it was not allowed to stay. Here was a kind of play which was the prelude to a great art-the child's first artand it was ignored in school.

The difficulty was that the only drama the teachers knew was the formal play, and that did not fit into the school curriculum. Whenever a play was being rehearsed for a special occasion, it so disrupted the school program that most teachers regarded it as an ordeal. It never seemed to occur to them to take their cue from the child's own way in drama-the spontaneous, uninhibited way. Instead, the only drama to be found in most elementary schools (there were a few exceptions) was the exhibitional type of memorized plays belonging to special occasions such as Christmas and "last day" exercises.

At one period, when the catchword in education began to be motivation, all kinds of plays were written to motivate the learning of facts: Arithmetic plays, geography plays, health plays, and history plays. Dramatics was welcomed as a "cart-horse," as someone expressed it, to carry every other subject in the curriculum. It would have been bad enough if the children had been given the experience of making up the plays themselves. But they had to memorize lines which were not at all a natural expression for them, and the result was that the children simply recited.

All too familiar are the artificial ways in which children give their speeches when they are "drilled" by parents and teachers to repeat lines they only half understand, or move through pageants with never a flicker of feeling on their impassive faces. Even when the children, with their teacher, write the plays themselves, they find it a strain to make up dialog which remotely resembles natural conversation if the objective of the play is instruction. The pictures of one play on soil conservation show a row of the children standing stiff and straight, representing the stumps of trees that have been burned by a forest

fire, while others are lying flat on the ground as "eroded topsoil." One wonders in how many children's lives the love of drama was snuffed out forever by such experiences as these.

Drama With Children

With the increasing emphasis in education on creative thinking and the development of individual powers, a way of using the child's natural love for the dramatic has developed which is not only suited to the classroom but has remarkable potentialities for his personal development. It is based on his own free, informal play, but guided into an orderly creative process by an imaginative teacher.

Courtesy, School of Drama, University of Washington, Seattle, Wash.

"Who's trip-tropping over my bridge?" Drama created by children from the Billy Goats Gruff.

This is drama with children. Because it is original, it has come to be known as creative drama, creative dramatics, or playmaking. In place of a written script, with lines to be memorized, such drama is created by a group of children, guided, but not directed by a teacher or leader. It is always played with spontaneous dialog and action,

and is never written down because written plays become formal scripts to be memorized.

Informal drama may be created from a story, a poem, an experience, a historical event, or an idea. The Western Movement in the United States, for instance, has been the inspiration for many a drama by fourth- or fifth-grade children. A trip to the zoo may motivate a second or third grade to play The Peddler and IIis Caps with its delightfully comic monkey episode. A splash of beautiful colors in the room may bring about a discussion of how colors make one feel, and by playing out such feeling in terms of action.

3

Unlike children's theater which is designed for an audience and played upon a stage with costumes and scenery, this informal drama needs merely space, with imagination supplying the scenery and costumes. The only audience, as a rule, is the part of the group not playing at the moment. This audience, however, is very important. especially with the older children, since it affords the needed opportunity for communication, builds appreciation for drama in those who watch, and makes evaluation more objective.

If the creative thinking of the children results in an exceptionally good play, it is sometimes shared with another group of children or with their parents. Such a sharing is not considered a performance but rather an informal demonstration, incidental to the really creative experience.

Creative dramatics is not for the talented few nor is its purpose to entertain an audience. Participation is all-important, and the experience of the child who lacks talent is often as fruitful and as enjoyable as that of the child with marked dramatic ability.

Creative Drama in the Language Arts

"What comes to your mind when I say the word ‘Ireland'?“ asked a fifth-grade teacher in a language arts session.

Faces brightened as they somehow always do at the mention of Ireland. Many hands shot up.

"Shillelaghs," "wee people," "wakes," "shamrocks," "leprechauns," were the first suggestions.

During a brief discussion of the meaning of the things which had come to their minds, they talked about the leprechauns and other wee folk in so many of the Irish tales,

Now the mood was right for the teacher's reading of Ruth Sawyer's

3 As told by Geraldine Siks in Stories to Dramatize, by Winifred Ward. Children's Theatre Press, Anchorage, Ky., 1952. P. 55.

charming version of Wee Meg Barnileg and the Fairies, the story of the spoiled child of easygoing parents who is spirited away by the wee folk. In the fairy rath to which they take her, all she has to eat is the food she has willfully thrown away; she has to wash and mend all the clothes she has ever torn or soiled; and, finally, pick out of all her ugly, sharp words, which are growing like a great field of nettles, the few kind words she has ever uttered.

When the teacher arrived at this point in the story, she pansed to ask, "Why do you think Meg was such a disagreeable child? Her parents were very kind. Why should they have such a child?"

"Maybe they were old and always let her have her own way," suggested one child.

"She did as she pleased, but it didn't make her happy," volunteered another.

"Her parents let her get away with things," said the next.

But the prize answer summed up all the rest. "She wasn't raised up right!"

"How do you think the story will end?" asked the teacher. Then, after the pupils had used their imaginations to work out possible outcomes, she read the rest of the story, which showed how each experience made Meg see herself and her parents a little more clearly; and when she found a shamrock with four leaves and wished herself home, she was so happy that she was a different child from that time on. Now the children "tried on" the characters of Meg, her parents, and the leprechauns in pantomime; planned a play based on the story; and in several class sessions developed a play. There was nothing passive about this experience. Every child was absorbed in spite of

the fact that the story was so strongly didactic. It gave them a wonderful outlet for their emotions, patterns of behavior which caused them to do some thinking, a fine Irish humor, and a variety of interesting characters to study.

Speaking and Listening.-Creative thinking is new to the thinker. It breaks fresh ground, makes new trails in the mind, and must be expressed in order to be recognized. A new idea is vague and nebulous in a thinker's mind until he has expressed it in words either to himself or others. No school experience gives a child a better opportunity to be creative than does playmaking."

A group of sixth-grade children were exploring the meaning of time, thinking aloud as they tried to put into words what time meant to them. Creative thinking requires effort-real effort-and the in

Sawyer. Ruth. The Way of the Storyteller. New York, Viking Press, 1942. p. 165. 3 Strickland, Ruth. The Language Arts in the Elementary School. D. C. Heath & Co. P. 11.

1951.

centive needs to be strong. They were considering ideas for the play they were to develop in the spring. They found out what they were thinking at the same time they were expressing it.

One child said, "Time is everything that has been and will be." Others: "Nothing can stop time. It goes on and on." "Men have always been trying to find out better ways of measuring time." A little girl went home and wrote a poem which she read the next day:

Time to me is a great white bird

Spreading its wings through the sky;

Eager hands reach up to grasp it,

As it flies relentlessly by.

The motive for listening is strong, too, in a creative drama group. Children will always listen to anything dramatic. But there is also a good reason to listen to a story or idea when it has something in it that they need to know in order to participate, and when others are playing a scene they know that they will have a chance to evaluate and then play it themselves.

Listening in order to evaluate. The audience in this creative drama class will

soon have its chance to play.