Extra Reading Notes: Reading B: Jataka Tales

I was hoping to find more tales about animals that could possibly be rewritten to go into my portfolio. I came across the Jataka Tales by Ellen Babbit, last week which closely resemble the Aesop Fables, one of my favorite reading units. For the second part of the reading there were thirteen different short tales about animals learning different life lessons. I picked three out of the thirteen that I thought I could change up to create my own animal lesson tale. The first tale, The Golden Goose, was about a Golden Goose that felt sorry for a mother and her two daughters that were very poor. To help them out the Golden Goose would go and take them one of his golden feathers, but the mother became greedy. The daughters were against her idea and would not help, but the next time the Golden Goose came by the mother pulled out all of his feathers. Because of her greediness, the feathers turned into to regular feathers and the Golden Goose could not grow his golden feathers back. I would like to change the story to have the daughters help the Golden Goose from getting all of his feathers taken off by the greedy mother. The Golden Goose and the daughters could then leave the mother to live alone a poor. The second tale I could possible change was the tale of The Foolhardy Wolf. In the tale, a Lion has mercy on a hungry weak Wolf who offers to be his servant if he will feed him. The Wolf grows strong and then begins to think that he can catch all the wild game instead of the Lion and wants to switch places with him. Because the Wolf has actually not learned anything, when he tries to catch an Elephant he misses and gets killed. This tale could be changed to where the Lion and Wolf become friends. In the friendship, the Lion could teach the Wolf how to hunt better so that one day the Lion releases the Wolf from being his servant and the Wolf goes and makes his own wolf pack. The finally story in the reading, Beauty and Brownie was a tale out two deer. One of the deer was very smart and followed the warnings of his father to keep his heard safe when they went off to find food while the other deer did not. What I did not like about the ending is the deer that did not follow his father’s warning got all of the deer in his heard killed by hunter but he lived. I would like to change the tale to where some of the herd does survive when they leave the bad deer’s back to join the good deer.  

A normal goose playing in the grass. Source: pixabay by PIRO4D