Second Grade Read Aloud Banquet

Songs for May


The Land of Story-Books

At evening when the lamp is lit,

Around the fire my parents sit;

They sit at home and talk and sing,

And do not play at anything.


Now, with my little gun, I crawl

All in the dark along the wall,

And follow round the forest track

Away behind the sofa back.


There, in the night, where none can spy,

All in my hunter's camp I lie,

And play at books that I have read

Till it is time to go to bed.


These are the hills, these are the woods,

These are my starry solitudes;

And there the river by whose brink

The roaring lions come to drink.


I see the others far away

As if in firelit camp they lay,

And I, like to an Indian scout,

Around their party prowled about.


So when my nurse comes in for me,

Home I return across the sea,

And go to bed with backward looks

At my dear land of Story-Books.

  Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday
Week 5 Pinocchio Is Hungry from Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi The White Ship from Fifty Famous Stories Retold by James Baldwin Sliding on the Ice from The Seasons: Winter by Jane Marcet Fire for the King's Son from The Girl Who Sat by the Ashes by Padraic Colum The Empire of Rome from On the Shores of the Great Sea by M. B. Synge Betsy Holds the Reins (Part 2 of 3) from Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher The Old Man Who Fought against the Giants from Hurlbut's Story of the Bible by Jesse Lyman Hurlbut
Foes'-fear from Viking Tales by Jennie Hall Balsam Fir (Part 2 of 3) from Outdoor Visits by Edith M. Patch The Dog, the Cock, and the Fox from The Aesop for Children by Milo Winter I Am Shipwrecked from Robinson Crusoe Written Anew for Children by James Baldwin Hercules from A Child's Book of Myths and Enchantment Tales by Margaret Evans Price Peter Rabbit Tells His Story from The Adventures of Prickly Porky by Thornton Burgess The Wedding Story from The Sandman: His Ship Stories by Willliam J. Hopkins
A Sea Song from the Shore by James Whitcomb Riley How Many Seconds in a Minute? by Christina Georgina Rossetti The Monkeys and the Crocodile by Laura E. Richards Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost The Song of the Soldiers by Walter de la Mare The Snowdrop by Alfred Lord Tennyson Falling Snow, Anonymous
First row Previous row          Next row Last row
The Aesop for Children  by Milo Winter

The Ants and the Grasshopper

One bright day in late autumn a family of Ants were bustling about in the warm sunshine, drying out the grain they had stored up during the summer, when a starving Grasshopper, his fiddle under his arm, came up and humbly begged for a bite to eat.

"What!" cried the Ants in surprise, "haven't you stored anything away for the winter? What in the world were you doing all last summer?"

"I didn't have time to store up any food," whined the Grasshopper; "I was so busy making music that before I knew it the summer was gone."


[Illustration]

The Ants shrugged their shoulders in disgust.

"Making music, were you?" they cried. "Very well; now dance!" And they turned their backs on the Grasshopper and went on with their work.

There's a time for work and a time for play.