Aesop for Children (Winter): Extra Reading Diary

Although I love Greek mythology, I remember having the book of Aesop's Fables as a kid. The stories were always simple but packed a valuable message. Reading through them again, I got the same impression I did all those years ago. Here's what I thought of a few of the stories from the first half of the unit.

The first story I liked a lot was the "Tortoise and the Ducks." The tortoise loses his life because he opens his mouth to tell the crow he is the king of the tortoises, even though the ducks told him not to or he'd be sorry. The moral of the story is not to let foolish curiosity and vanity in your life because they often lead to misfortune. This is a valuable lesson (like most of Aesop's fables) to humans because all too often being too proud or curious can get us into trouble, in more ways than one. 

The tortoise before he met his untimely demise.

The next one I thought was good was "The Boy and the Filberts." He gets his hand stuck in a jar trying to get them, when all he has to do is take fewer at a time. The moral of this story is don't try to do too much at once. This is especially relevant to college students, particularly during finals week. We're all guilty of putting off studying until the night before the test and trying to cram everything in at one time. If we had studied in small sections over the course of the week (even though that's hard to do sometimes), we probably wouldn't be so exhausted during finals week!

"The Farmer and the Stork" is a story that especially stuck out to me. In it, the stork went with a party of cranes and got into some trouble in the farmer's field. He pleaded with the farmer to let him go, for he was a member of an honest and trustworthy family. But since he was with the cranes, the farmer told him he would receive the same punishments as them. You are judged by the company you keep is the moral of the story and something we should all be wary of. You could be the nicest, most honest person in the world, but if you hang out with the wrong crowd, people will automatically judge you as a bad person almost every time.