ReadJack and the Beanstalk
Jack swaps a cow for five magic beans, climbs a beanstalk above the clouds and escapes a giant with a little hen and a golden harp.
Retold from: Joseph Jacobs
Joseph Jacobs was a folklorist whose “English Fairy Tales” (1890) collects “The Three Little Pigs”, “The Three Bears” and other beloved English tales.
He was born in 1854 in Sydney, moved to England as a young man and studied at Cambridge. Jacobs was a historian and a scholar of folk tales, and in 1900 he moved to the United States, where he died in 1916.
He wanted to show that the English have folk tales of their own, no worse than the German ones of the Brothers Grimm. So Jacobs gathered “English Fairy Tales” and, in 1894, “More English Fairy Tales”, and retold them in plain language that is easy to read aloud.
The site already has “The Three Little Pigs” and “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”. The story of the three bears was first printed by the poet Robert Southey in 1837; Jacobs took it into his collection, and later the uninvited guest came to be called Goldilocks.
Stories
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The Three Little Pigs
Three little pigs build houses of straw, sticks and bricks. When the wolf comes, only the brick one stands, so two brothers must build again.
ReadGoldilocks and the Three Bears
A little girl named Goldilocks wanders into a cottage in the woods, tastes the bears' porridge, breaks a little chair and falls asleep in someone else’s bed.