First Grade Read Aloud Banquet

Songs for February

Hot Cross Buns



Natural History



Pussy Cat



Warm Hands

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 8 My Father Meets a Gorilla from My Father's Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett How Franklin Found Out Things from Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans by Edward Eggleston The Dance of the Sand-Hill Cranes from Among the Pond People by Clara Dillingham Pierson Drakestail Goes To See the King from Fairy Tales Too Good To Miss—Around the Fire by Lisa M. Ripperton Back to the Fatherland from On the Shores of the Great Sea by M. B. Synge The Pass (Part 1 of 3) from The Swiss Twins by Lucy Fitch Perkins The Story of a Long Journey from Hurlbut's Story of the Bible by Jesse Lyman Hurlbut
Pussy-Cat Mew, Anonymous 		Lines and Squares by A. A. Milne
Three Little Owlets, Anonymous 		My Treasures by Robert Louis Stevenson King and Queen, Anonymous
The Ship by Gabriel Setoun 		I Dug and Dug amongst the Snow 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.