(Half a) Story Hour - Episode 3

Episode 3, “The Secret Garden: We Finish Chapter One (Finally!) and Start Chapter Two”

In this episode, we finally finish Chapter One of The Secret Garden and start reading Chapter Two!  Mary learns that she is now an orphan and is taken to the house of an English churchman near her home in India, where she doesn’t much like her host family.

Tough stuff in this episode: cholera, the British Empire, death, a (very cute) snake, teasing

⭐️ Bonus ⭐️

Follow along here: The Secret Garden at Project Gutenberg Online

(Inter)active reading suggestion: Ask (even bigger) questions!  (Plus some visualising and connecting)

For teachers: Each student draws six thought bubbles on a page and comes up with a question for each of the major question words based on today’s reading: who, what, where, when, why, how…? ✏️ 💭

Musical interlude: “Turtles” from Le Carnaval des animaux by Camille Saint-Saëns

Other Stuff…

Ernest H. Shepard’s illustration of the snake in Mary’s bedroom…

…and of Mary in her four-poster bed - not at all afraid! (She knows it’s a harmless snake.)

Easter 🪺: Like all nerdy nerds, your “fairy tale auntie” scribbles notes on her books, as you can see… only in pencil, though!

And – can you hear the cough in the Seattle Youth Symphony recording? Everybody’s gotta cough!