First Grade Read Aloud Banquet

Songs for December

I Saw Three Ships



The Mulberry Bush



The North Wind and the Robin



Dance a Baby

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 42 The Discovery of Oz the Terrible from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum Doctor Kane Gets Out of the Frozen Sea from Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans by Edward Eggleston Other Eggs from Seed-Babies by Margaret Warner Morley A Quick-Running Squash from Fairy Tales Too Good To Miss—Around the Fire by Lisa M. Ripperton Back to Rome Again from On the Shores of the Great Sea by M. B. Synge Tonio's Bad Day (Part 2 of 2) from The Mexican Twins by Lucy Fitch Perkins What a Wise Man Learned from an Ass (Part 1 of 2) from Hurlbut's Story of the Bible by Jesse Lyman Hurlbut
Jack Frost by Celia Thaxter 		Growing Up by A. A. Milne Wee Willie Winkie, Anonymous Where Go the Boats? by Robert Louis Stevenson Lady Moon by Lord Houghton October's Party by George Cooper If a Pig Wore a Wig by Christina Georgina Rossetti
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The Aesop for Children  by Milo Winter

The Milkmaid and Her Pail

A Milkmaid had been out to milk the cows and was returning from the field with the shining milk pail balanced nicely on her head. As she walked along, her pretty head was busy with plans for the days to come.

"This good, rich milk," she reused, "will give me plenty of cream to churn. The butter I make I will take to market, and with the money I get for it I will buy a lot of eggs for hatching. How nice it will be when they are all hatched and the yard is full of fine young chicks. Then when May day comes I will sell them, and with the money I'll buy a lovely new dress to wear to the fair. All the young men will look at me. They will come and try to make love to me,—but I shall very quickly send them about their business!"

As she thought of how she would settle that matter, she tossed her head scornfully, and down fell the pail of milk to the ground. And all the milk flowed out, and with it vanished butter and eggs and chicks and new dress and all the milkmaid's pride.

Do not count your chickens before they are hatched.


[Illustration]