Big Bird looked down Sesame Street. Everything was covered with a thick layer of white snow. Big Bird sighed. It had been a long winter. He was tired of looking at plain white snow.


Big Bird walked through the park and thought about all the things he couldn’t do because of the snow. He couldn’t ride his unicycle down Sesame Street. He couldn’t play in the sandbox in the playground. He couldn’t roller-skate on the sidewalk.
“Besides, winter is so gloomy,” thought Big Bird. “I wish spring were here.” Suddenly Big Bird had a wonderful idea. “I’ll buy some flowers to put in my...

There was once a tiny little girl. She was sweet and pretty and no taller than your thumb, so Thumbelina was her given name.

A nicely varnished walnut shell made a bed for her, with a violet petal mattress and a rose leaf coverlet.
That was where she slept at night; but in the daytime she played about in a small dish garden where she rowed her tulip-petal boat from side to side of a tiny flower-wreathed lake.
It was a most charming sight she made, and she sang as she went in the sweetest little voice you ever heard.

One night as she lay in her pretty bed, a great ugly toad came hopping in through...

One summer day a mother duck's eggs began to crack. Six little ducklings broke out from their shells. "Peep, peep," they cried.
"Are you all here?" the mother asked. "One, two, three, four, five, six," she counted. One egg, much bigger than all the others, had not yet hatched. So the mother duck sat and sat on that big egg, and at last it began to crack. "Peep, peep," cried the duckling.

Leading her brood to the pond, the mother gasped when she saw the new duckling waddling along, for he was big and ugly. “He does not look like the others”, she thought. “I wonder if he can swim.”

The ducklings...