First Grade Read Aloud Banquet

Songs for August

Ding Dong Bell



Hush-a-by Baby



The Old Woman of Norwich



The Scare-Crow

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 Lion and the Mouse

A Lion lay asleep in the forest, his great head resting on his paws. A timid little Mouse came upon him unexpectedly, and in her fright and haste to get away, ran across the Lion's nose. Roused from his nap, the Lion laid his huge paw angrily on the tiny creature to kill her.

"Spare me!" begged the poor Mouse. "Please let me go and some day I will surely repay you."

The Lion was much amused to think that a Mouse could ever help him. But he was generous and finally let the Mouse go.

Some days later, while stalking his prey in the forest, the Lion was caught in the toils of a hunter's net. Unable to free himself, he filled the forest with his angry roaring. The Mouse knew the voice and quickly found the Lion struggling in the net. Running to one of the great ropes that bound him, she gnawed it until it parted, and soon the Lion was free.


[Illustration]

"You laughed when I said I would repay you," said the Mouse. "Now you see that even a Mouse can help a Lion."

A kindness is never wasted.