words.
(a) The boy’s task was to … the sheep.
(b) The wolves lived in the . . .
(c) … the boy cried wolf and twice the villagers came to help him.
(d) The boy had to watch the wolf … the sheep one by one.
(e) The lesson this fable teaches is that if you tell lies, you will not be … even when you tell the truth.
6. Tell your partner about an occasion when you were not believed even though you were telling the truth. Why were you not believed?
7. Do you remember this story of a boy who told lies? Tell your partner.
8. Now read the following fable to yourself. What is its moral? Discuss this with your partner.
The Miser
A miserly man sold everything he had and bought a lump of gold with the money. He buried this gold in a hole that he dug next to an old wall at the back of his house. Every day he went to look at his gold. He dug it up and then reburied it. One of the men who worked for him saw these daily visits and decided to see what they were about. He found the lump of gold and stole it.
The next day when the miser went to look at his gold he saw that it was gone. He was very unhappy, tore out his hair and cried loudly. A neighbour heard the noise and came to see what the matter was. When he heard what had happened he said:
‘Take a stone and bury it in the place where the gold was. Imagine that this stone is your lump of gold. The stone will serve exactly the same purpose as the gold did, for you were not making any use of the gold at all.’
9. Discuss with your partner: Have the people in the drawings learnt the lesson the fable teaches?
Speaking to an audience
What makes us want to listen to someone speaking in public?
• We must want to hear what the person has to say, so it must be interesting or funny or important.
• We must also be able to hear and understand the person speaking.
• We need to feel that the person is speaking to us.
When you speak in public you need to remember these three rules. In the next activity you are going to practise giving a speech.
1. In your group, discuss the pets you have or have had in the past. Talk about what is good or bad about keeping a pet. Have any of you had a good or bad experience with an animal?
2. Look at the drawings on the opposite page. What creatures are these? Do you know of anyone who has had any of them as pets? Discuss which one you would like and take turns saying why you have chosen it.
3. In your group each chooses any one creature. It does not have to be one of those in the picture on the next page, but no member of the group must have the same creature as another member.
4. Go and find information on the animal of your choice. Write the information out in the form of a speech. When you come back to class, you are each going to present your speech to your group. The group can decide who made the best speech.
5. Use the checklist below to help you prepare your speech. You can also use it to judge your group members’ speeches.
6. Present your speech to your group.
7. Decide for yourself whose speech you found the most interesting. Write two sentences saying why you chose this particular speech. Be sure to express yourself in a clear way, using correct language and vocabulary.
8. Now, just for fun, see how many different animals you see in this strange creature. Compare your list with your group’s. What can we call this creature?
Nouns and adjectives
How did you do in Activity 1.5? Did you remember all the parts of speech? We are going to remind you here about nouns and adjectives.
There are four kinds of nouns:
• proper nouns: names, e.g. Peter, Pretoria
• common nouns: name things, e.g. dog, snake, lion
• collective nouns: name a collection of things, e.g. flock, herd, litter
• abstract nouns: name things we cannot touch or see, e.g. joy, pain
Adjectives describe nouns, e.g a big dog, a poisonous snake, a fierce lion.
In the next activity you are going to play a game using nouns and adjectives.
Make sure you know what they are.
1. Your teacher will have two boxes. In the one box there are small slips of paper with an adjective written on each and in the other a noun. You must take one piece of paper out of each box.
2. Now draw a picture which suits your two pieces. Make it funny and interesting. Use colour. Here is an example for you:
3. Show your picture to your group. Let them guess what your noun and adjective were. Decide together whose drawing is the strangest.
Reading and writing
You learnt to read and write years ago. This is called being ‘literate’. However, literacy consists of skills that you will go on improving all your life.
Sometimes we need to ‘read’ drawings or diagrams: cartoons, signs, charts, tables, graphs, and maps, for example. This is called ‘visual literacy’. Sometimes we even need to change words into diagrams, or diagrams into words. To do this we have to understand what we read or see.
In the next activity we are going to practise reading and writing in several of these ways.
1. A cartoon consists of a drawing and is usually meant to be funny. Often there are words in a cartoon, either spoken by someone in the cartoon, given in a speech bubble pointing to the mouth of the speaker, or a caption or heading telling us what the cartoon is about. Here is a cartoon. Look at it and read what the dog is thinking.
