Tales about effort
THE BRIGHTLY COLOURED BEACH UMBRELLA
Just as they did every summer, Charlie, his sister and his parents were off to their beach house where they would spend the whole summer until Charlie and Laura began school again in September.
Every day they would go to the beach, so the idea was to get up very early so as to be first on the beach and be able to choose a spot without a single beach umbrella to spoil their view.
But unfortunately they were never the first to arrive, for Charlie was a lazy-bones. Even though he had an alarm that was so loud it would wake up their neighbours, it was never enough to get him out of bed.
When his mother saw that Charlie hadn’t got up, she would march into his room to tell him that if he didn’t get up they would go to the beach without him. Well, that always made him leap out of bed like a flash of lightning…
Charlie liked playing with his sister on the shore by the waves; he especially loved making sand castles, but his parents wouldn’t let him go because their beach umbrella was right at the back of the beach and their view of the shore was blocked by hundreds more parasols.
This made Charlie very angry with his parents, so he spent all morning under their beach umbrella staring at all the people in front of them and not saying a word. Read the rest of this short story »
Posted in Children´s stories, Parents stories, Short stories for kids, Tales about effort | 
Tags: Beach, Sea | 
2 Comments »THE ANT AND THE GRAIN
Once upon a time there was a little ant called Anita. She was very hard-working and lived in an anthill with the rest of her family – about 50,000 relatives.
The ants were busy storing the grain for the winter so that when the cold weather came there would be enough food for everyone. But this year, the grain was very small and difficult to transport. It was a gloomy situation and even the wisest old ants weren’t sure they could survive the winter.
But Anita wanted to store as much grain as possible to help her family, and she knew that by showing an optimistic attitude around the rest of the ants, they could do it. So off she went to train with an ant who was much stronger than her, an ant called Alexander.
Alexander taught her a few tricks on how to carry more grain with the same amount of effort. Anita trained for a few days and as the days went past, she was able to carry more and more.
When Anita was finally ready, she called the rest of the ants together and told them: “I know you think we won’t survive the winter. But I have a solution: firstly, you have to believe we can do it, and secondly, I’ll teach you what you need to do to carry more grain.”
And so the whole anthill set to work like Anita said, with optimism and a hopeful heart, and before the winter arrived they had already gathered more grain than the year before. And so it was that, thanks to Anita, all the ants survived the winter without any problem.
THE END
Posted in Animal stories, Fables for kids, Optimism stories, Perseverance stories, Tales about effort | Tags: Ants | 1 Comment »
