Second Grade Read Aloud Banquet

Songs for April

Little Jack Horner



The Little Disaster



My Pretty Maid



The Ploughboy in Luck

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 4 The Talking-Cricket from Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi The Sons of William the Conqueror from Fifty Famous Stories Retold by James Baldwin The Sun from The Seasons: Winter by Jane Marcet The Girl in the Goat-shed from The Girl Who Sat by the Ashes by Padraic Colum The Death of Caesar from On the Shores of the Great Sea by M. B. Synge Betsy Holds the Reins (Part 1 of 3) from Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher How Joshua Conquered the Land of Canaan from Hurlbut's Story of the Bible by Jesse Lyman Hurlbut
Olaf's Fight with Havard from Viking Tales by Jennie Hall White Pine (Part 1 of 3) from Outdoor Visits by Edith M. Patch The Frogs and the Ox from The Aesop for Children by Milo Winter I Undertake a New Venture from Robinson Crusoe Written Anew for Children by James Baldwin Pegasus and Bellerophon from A Child's Book of Myths and Enchantment Tales by Margaret Evans Price Peter Rabbit Has Some Startling News from The Adventures of Prickly Porky by Thornton Burgess The Rigging Story from The Sandman: His Ship Stories by Willliam J. Hopkins
The Sandman by Margaret Vandegrift
The Quarrelsome Kittens, Anonymous 		At the Zoo by A. A. Milne The Twenty-Third Psalm, Bible The Old House by Walter de la Mare The Lighthouse by Sir Walter Scott Up and Down by George MacDonald
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The Aesop for Children  by Milo Winter

The Ass and the Load of Salt

A Merchant, driving his Ass homeward from the seashore with a heavy load of salt, came to a river crossed by a shallow ford. They had crossed this river many times before without accident, but this time the Ass slipped and fell when halfway over. And when the Merchant at last got him to his feet, much of the salt had melted away. Delighted to find how much lighter his burden had become, the Ass finished the journey very gayly.

Next day the Merchant went for another load of salt. On the way home the Ass, remembering what had happened at the ford, purposely let himself fall into the water, and again got rid of most of his burden.

The angry Merchant immediately turned about and drove the Ass back to the seashore, where he loaded him with two great baskets of sponges. At the ford the Ass again tumbled over; but when he had scrambled to his feet, it was a very disconsolate Ass that dragged himself homeward under a load ten times heavier than before.

The same measures will not suit all circumstances.


[Illustration]

The Ass and the Load of Salt