The thirsty crow - a reading lesson

Have you heard of Aesop’s Fables? These are short stories which teach us useful life lessons. The most famous one is about a hare and a tortoise who have a race. The hare is so confident he will win that he stops for a rest and falls asleep so the tortoise wins! I expect a lot of you will know this story so today I’m going to tell you another one of Aesop’s stories that’s less well known.

If you would like to listen to the story and hear my voice, you can do that here.

Here’s some vocabulary you need to know to understand the story. You can see a lot of these things in the picture.

crow = a large black bird
thirsty = needing a drink
jug = a container with a handle which we pour drinks from
stone = a small rock
beak = the mouth of a bird

Here’s the story, in my own words.

Once there was a crow and he was so thirsty that he thought he might die of thirst. He really needed to find some water to drink soon. After looking for a while, he found a jug which had some water in the bottom. However, the opening of the jug was too small for him and he couldn’t reach the water no matter how hard he tried.

Then he had an idea. There were some small stones near the jug so he started to pick the stones up with his beak and drop them into the jug. Patiently, he added more and more stones and the water level gradually rose higher. Eventually, the level of the water was high enough for him to reach and he was able to have a long cool drink.

So what do you think this story means?

I found a few different answers online. One possible meaning is that difficult and urgent situations cause us to find clever ideas and solutions. Or necessity is the mother of invention, as a famous proverb says.

Another possible meaning is that cleverness is better than force. If the crow had knocked the jug over, maybe the water would have spilled out and been lost. In some versions of the story, the crow tries to knock the jug over but it’s too heavy.

One more suggested meaning is that you will reach your goal in the end if you keep going step by step, just like the crow had to keep adding one stone after the other. This is a good lesson for language learners! When English seems difficult, just keep going step by step and don’t give up!


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