First Grade Read Aloud Banquet

Songs for March

Baa! Baa! Black Sheep



Cock Robin and Jenny Wren



Warm Hands



Polly Put the Kettle On

Alone

A very old woman

Lives in yon house.

The squeak of the cricket,

The stir of the mouse,

Are all she knows

Of the earth and us.


Once she was young,

Would dance and play,

Like many another

Young popinjay;

And run to her mother

At dusk of day.


And colours bright

She delighted in;

The fiddle to hear,

And to lift her chin,

And sing as small

As a twittering wren.


But age apace

Comes at last to all;

And a lone house filled

With the cricket's call;

And the scampering mouse

In the hollow wall.

  Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday
Week 32 The Rescue of the Tin Woodman from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum The Star-Spangled Banner from Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans by Edward Eggleston The Bay Colt Learns to Mind from Among the Farmyard People by Clara Dillingham Pierson The Story of Epaminodas and His Auntie from Fairy Tales Too Good To Miss—Around the Fire by Lisa M. Ripperton The Death of Socrates from On the Shores of the Great Sea by M. B. Synge What They Saw from The Irish Twins by Lucy Fitch Perkins The Mountain That Smoked and Words That Were Spoken from It from Hurlbut's Story of the Bible by Jesse Lyman Hurlbut
A Verse by George MacDonald 		Knights and Ladies by A. A. Milne
I Saw a Ship by Kate Greenaway 		Foreign Lands by Robert Louis Stevenson Rushes by Christina Georgina Rossetti How Doth the Little Busy Bee by Isaac Watts A House of Cards by Christina Georgina Rossetti
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The Aesop for Children  by Milo Winter

The Tortoise and the Ducks

The Tortoise, you know, carries his house on his back. No matter how hard he tries, he cannot leave home. They say that Jupiter punished him so, because he was such a lazy stay-at-home that he would not go to Jupiter's wedding, even when especially invited.

After many years, Tortoise began to wish he had gone to that wedding. When he saw how gaily the birds flew about and how the Hare and the Chipmunk and all the other animals ran nimbly by, always eager to see everything there was to be seen, the Tortoise felt very sad and discontented. He wanted to see the world too, and there he was with a house on his back and little short legs that could hardly drag him along.

One day he met a pair of Ducks and told them all his trouble.

"We can help you to see the world," said the Ducks. "Take hold of this stick with your teeth and we will carry you far up in the air where you can see the whole countryside. But keep quiet or you will be sorry."

The Tortoise was very glad indeed. He seized the stick firmly with his teeth, the two Ducks took hold of it one at each end, and away they sailed up toward the clouds.


[Illustration]

Just then a Crow flew by. He was very much astonished at the strange sight and cried:

"This must surely be the King of Tortoises!"

"Why certainly—" began the Tortoise.

But as he opened his mouth to say these foolish words he lost his hold on the stick, and down he fell to the ground, where he was dashed to pieces on a rock.

Foolish curiosity and vanity often lead to misfortune.