The Little Red Hen

src: i.ytimg.com

Little Red Hen is an old fable type tale, most likely from Russia. This story is applied in teaching children the virtues of work ethics and personal initiative.

Video The Little Red Hen

Role in read instruction

During the 1880s, reading instruction in the United States continued to evolve to include primers known as literary readers. Prior to this time, very moralistic and religious texts were used to teach literacy. The Little Red Hen offers a moral story about the importance of hard work and shame, as well as the consequences of laziness. During this time, consideration of a young reader's interest becomes more important for reading teaching. In considering young readers, the author of this genre makes their text visually appealing both through illustrations and text formats. "Margaret Free and Harriette Taylor Treadwell are the first authors to prepare novice readers with content that is entirely composed of adaptations of old stories." (Smith, 1965/2002, p. 141). The folklore genre lends itself to recurring vocabulary - early reading strategies are still in use today.

Maps The Little Red Hen

Plot

In fairy tales, small red chickens find a grain and ask for help from other farm animals (most adaptations feature three animals, pigs, cats, and rats, ducks, geese, dogs or goats) to plant it, but they all resist.

At each subsequent stage (harvesting, threshing, cultivating wheat into flour, and baking flour into bread), the chicken again asks for help from another animal, but again he does not receive any help.

Finally, the chicken has finished his task and asked who will help him eat the bread. This time, all the previous non-participants eagerly volunteered, but he disagreed with them, stating that nobody helped him in his job. Thus, the chickens eat it with their children, leaving nothing for anyone else.

The moral of the story is that those who do not contribute to produce products do not deserve to enjoy the product: "if something does not work, it should not eat."

src: kidsteachers.files.wordpress.com

In popular culture

• The Disney-produced Silly Symphony titled The Wise Little Hen uses this story as its basis. This version featured Peter Pig and Donald Duck (in debut), not feline cats and frogs, as people who refused to participate in bread preparations.
• The political revision of the story includes a conservative version, based on the monologue of Ronald Reagan from 1976. The farmer claims that the hen is unfair if he does not share his bread with other animals and forces him to share bread with those who do not want to work for it. This in turn eliminates chicken incentives for work that result in poverty for the entire barn. The alternative version reinvents this story as an allusion to capitalism, with slices of chicken promising bread in return for work, but keeping the lion's share to itself despite not doing any work. Malvina Reynolds twisted the story by making it a pro-working anti-shout antisocial song, with the chicken worker retaining all of his work: "And that's why they called him Red."
• The Little Red Hen is shown in episode 14 of the animated series Super Why! In this book, animals that refuse to help Little Red Hen make cornbreads are dogs, cats and a duck. Super Why changed the end by asking three animals to help Little Red Hen to bake a cornbread for his children and then join him in eating cornbread.
• Jerry Pinkney's remarks in the form of picture book The Little Red Hen were published in 2006.

src: fee.org

See also

• Ants and Grasshoppers, Aesop tales with the same moral

src: i.ytimg.com

References

src: 1.bp.blogspot.com

External links

Little Red Hen: An Old English Folk Tale (HTML version), Retold and Illustrated by Florence White Williams, Saalfield Publishing Company, 1918, available from Project Gutenberg

Source of the article : Wikipedia