leaps and bounds: the little red hen

This…..

(if you can believe it) is a story that you probably already know. You might not know this exact version and you probably won’t have seen it presented in quite this way. But it is the story of the Little Red Hen (who in this particular version wears a rather fetching straw hat to do the gardening).

If you follow the sequence of arrows you will see that first of all she finds some seeds (which of course she plants without the help of her so-called friends). And once the seedlings poke their green shoots out of the soil she waters them with her bright green watering can (and no, her friends don’t help with this task either).

When the corn (for the seeds she found were wheat seeds) is ripe and golden, she takes her machete (!) and (all alone) she slaves away until the corn is cut. She pours the wheat into a sack which she lugs all the way to the mill. And which of her friends helped her with all of this? Not a single one!

At the mill, she singlehandedly grinds the wheat into flour. The flour she then kneads into dough and this she bakes into a delicious crusty loaf of bread (although due to the shortness of time, we used a canny machine for this part of the story).

“Who will help me eat this bread?” she cries as she tips the piping hot bread out of the pan.

Well, you can imagine the response. After all, the smell was mouth-wateringly delicious. And it came just as lunchtime was approaching.

This particular Little Red Hen in fact very generously shared her loaf with a classroom full of hungry children (“More! More!” they cried) but in the real tale of course she did not.

Now if you had to re-tell the tale to someone else, which parts of the story would you draw to make a ‘storyboard’ to remind you?