This paper provides an analysis of plot structure in stories freely narrated by five-to-ten-year-old elementary school children. The question was raised whether the stories, collected over a two-year period, would reflect the children's transition from home to school by a shift from a private to a public character. Structural analyses of plot, derived from the theories of Claude Levi-Strauss, Vladimir Propp, and Jean Piaget, were shown to have value in detecting developmental shifts in the children's narration. Subjecting the stories to the type of analysis used in the evaluation of mythology and folk tales revealed the children's initiation into public legend. Thus, the content of the children's fantasies was shown to reflect the basis of cultural mythology and to provide an index of the level of socialization into that mythology. (KS)