fa*ble 1 A fable is a story which teaches a moral lesson. Fables sometimes have animals as the main characters....the fable of the tortoise and the hare...Each tale has the timeless quality of fable. N-VAR 2 You can describe a statement or explanation that is untrue but that many people believe as fable.Is reincarnation fact or fable?...little-known horticultural facts and fables. N-VAR = myth

(c) HarperCollins Publishers.

A fable is a succinct story, in prose or verse, that features animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature which are anthropomorphized (given human qualities), and that illustrates a moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy maxim.A fable differs from a parable in that the latter excludes animals.

The word "fable" comes from the Latin "fabula" (a "story"), itself derived from "fari" ("to speak") with the -ula suffix that signifies "little": hence, a "little story"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fable

550 BC

SATIRE

1621-1695

The Frog that wished to be as big as the Ox

The Raven and the Fox

The Grasshopper and the Ant

Little Red RidingHood

The Little Girl

andthe Wolf

James Thurber, one of the outstanding American humorists of the twentieth century, is known for his distinctively funny cartoons and short stories. His concise, witty prose spanned a breadth of genres, including autobiography, fiction, children's fantasy, and modern commentary, and two of his short stories, "The Catbird Seat" and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," are among the best-known classics of American literature.

http://www.thurberhouse.org/james/james.html

One afternoon a big wolf waited in a dark forest for a little girl to come along carrying a basket of food to her grandmother. Finally a little girl did come along and she was carrying a basket of food. "Are you carrying that basket to your grandmother?" asked the wolf. The little girl said yes, she was. So the wolf asked her where her grandmother lived and the little girl told him and he disappeared into the wood.

When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother's house she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and nightgown on. She had approached no nearer than twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead.

Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.

BIRDS

A chick – baby bird

A fledgling – young bird

PREY

MAMMALS

quills

INVERTEBRATES

• WORM

• INSECT e.g.

• OCTOPUS

IDIOMS

• A fly-on-the-wall TV programme.• She took the lion’s share.• He couldn’t keep it a secret. He let the cat

out of the bag.• I didn’t know her address. So trying to find

her was a bit of a wild goose chase.• She has a bee in her bonnet about jogging

to get fit (obsessed).

• http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/learnit/learnitv355.shtml