First Grade Read Aloud Banquet

Songs for April

If All the World Were Paper



The Little Cock Sparrow



Ye Song of Sixpence



My Lady's Garden

My Shadow

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,

And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.

He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;

And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.


The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow—

Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;

For he sometimes shoots up taller like an india-rubber ball,

And he sometimes gets so little that there's none of him at all.


He hasn't got a notion of how children ought to play,

And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.

He stays so close beside me, he's a coward, you can see;

I'd think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me!


One morning, very early, before the sun was up,

I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup;

But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head,

Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.

  Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday
Week 6 My Father Meets a Rhinoceros from My Father's Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett The Story of a Wise Woman from Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans by Edward Eggleston Why the Sheep Ran Away from Among the Farmyard People by Clara Dillingham Pierson Tom Thumb from Fairy Tales Too Good To Miss—Up the Stairs by Lisa M. Ripperton In a Strange Land from On the Shores of the Great Sea by M. B. Synge The Lonely Herdsman (Part 1 of 2) from The Swiss Twins by Lucy Fitch Perkins The Great Ship That Saved Eight People from Hurlbut's Story of the Bible by Jesse Lyman Hurlbut
Precocious Piggy by Thomas Hood 		Twinkletoes by A. A. Milne
The Rock-a-By Lady by Eugene Field 		Happy Thought by Robert Louis Stevenson The Snow-Bird by Frank Dempster Sherman Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star by Jane Taylor Can't by Christina Georgina Rossetti
First row Previous row          Next row Last row
The Aesop for Children  by Milo Winter

The North Wind and the Sun

The North Wind and the Sun had a quarrel about which of them was the stronger. While they were disputing with much heat and bluster, a Traveler passed along the road wrapped in a cloak.

"Let us agree," said the Sun, "that he is the stronger who can strip that Traveler of his cloak."

"Very well," growled the North Wind, and at once sent a cold, howling blast against the Traveler.


[Illustration]

With the first gust of wind the ends of the cloak whipped about the Traveler's body. But he immediately wrapped it closely around him, and the harder the Wind blew, the tighter he held it to him. The North Wind tore angrily at the cloak, but all his efforts were in vain.

Then the Sun began to shine. At first his beams were gentle, and in the pleasant warmth after the bitter cold of the North Wind, the Traveler unfastened his cloak and let it hang loosely from his shoulders. The Sun's rays grew warmer and warmer. The man took off his cap and mopped his brow. At last he became so heated that he pulled off his cloak, and, to escape the blazing sunshine, threw himself down in the welcome shade of a tree by the roadside.

Gentleness and kind persuasion win where force and bluster fail.


[Illustration]