SUMMARY
The home may develop the dramatic instinct by encouraging dramatic play and games. Some of the most inexpensive and accessible homemade playthings are the most valuable for dramatic purposes.
Through serial and cooperative dramatic play, the parent enters into and retains the pleasantest kind of fellowship with his children. There is excellent opportunity to employ this kind of play in story-telling and at the family festivals.
Folk-dancing is a form of dramatic play which, historically, has been of great importance and is to-day most valuable in stimulating artistic capacity and making the child bodily and spiritually graceful and harmonious.
Parents will find their best resource for children’s parties in inviting all those present to exercise the dramatic instinct.
Through such dramatics, the home, the school and the social center have excellent opportunities to bring themselves close to the children. Beginning with pantomime and continuing with originative story-playing, the child, by and by, in adolescence, comes to the period when he is ready to perform memorized plays. By doing so he gains a new form of expression and becomes capable of recognizing what is really fine in the drama.
The parent should crave, and the social worker plan, so that every child will have the opportunity during the “gang” period of belonging to some social club whose scheme is based upon imaginative play. In such organizations, young people live out together actual revivals of pioneer activities and virtues and of the days and deeds of chivalry. A similar opportunity is possible in the schools, through dramatic self-government.
The parent ought to be interested in the tendency that is manifest in the church to recognize and revive the sacred drama. Both through liturgy and the church festivals it is possible to make the strongest spiritual impression upon children.