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 1 My Father Meets the Cat from My Father's Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett The First Governor in Boston from Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans by Edward Eggleston The Very Short Story of the Foolish Little Mouse from Among the Farmyard People by Clara Dillingham Pierson Rumpelstiltskin from Fairy Tales Too Good To Miss—Around the Fire by Lisa M. Ripperton The Home of Abraham from On the Shores of the Great Sea by M. B. Synge The Responsible Cuckoo from The Swiss Twins by Lucy Fitch Perkins Saint Kentigern (Part 1 of 2) from Our Island Saints by Amy Steedman
The Man in the Moon, Anonymous 		Corner-of-the-Street by A. A. Milne
The New Year by Dinah Mulock 		The Lamplighter by Robert Louis Stevenson The Months by Richard B. Sheridan Animal Crackers by Christopher Morley A Diamond or a Coal? by Christina Georgina Rossetti
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The Aesop for Children  by Milo Winter

The Goose and the Golden Egg

There was once a Countryman who possessed the most wonderful Goose you can imagine, for every day when he visited the nest, the Goose had laid a beautiful, glittering, golden egg.


[Illustration]

The Goose and the Golden Egg

The Countryman took the eggs to market and soon began to get rich. But it was not long before he grew impatient with the Goose because she gave him only a single golden egg a day. He was not getting rich fast enough.

Then one day, after he had finished counting his money, the idea came to him that he could get all the golden eggs at once by killing the Goose and cutting it open. But when the deed was done, not a single golden egg did he find, and his precious Goose was dead.

Those who have plenty want more and so lose all they have.