The Legend of Sun, Moon, and Stars

In this lesson, you will be able to:

A. define what a legend is;

B. discover that owning something has responsibilities; and

C. infer meaning from sentences.​

Long ago our elders say, the sky was so close to the earth that one could touch it.

But there were only two people who lived then. They were the first man and woman.

It has been said that the first woman was very vain. She wore so much jewelry and despised work. Whenever the first man would ask her to do something, she would pout. She pouted when he asked her to clean the house. She pouted whenever he asked her to cook. She pouted whenever he asked her to grind the rice grains every day for their food.

"But if you don't grind the rice, we don't get to eat," the first man reasoned, and even the vain first woman could not dispute that.

But it was so much work grinding the rice with a little pestle and mortar. So she poured all the rice for the day into a very large mortar and took up a very large pestle to grind it with. The pestle was so tall that when it hit the mortar, it touched the sky. The first woman was oblivious to this. She only knew she had to grind all the rice before her husband came home for supper.

She still wore all her jewelry. She noticed that her jewelry kept falling off or hampered her whenever she worked. So she hung her larger pieces of jewelry, which were her silver comb, her gold ring, and her long pearl necklace on the sky.

Then she went to work with the huge pestle, not knowing that as one end of the pestle pounded the rice grains, the other end was pounding the sky. The first woman only knew that the sky was so low that it made her task more difficult. So she pounded harder and harder on the rice. Higher and higher the sky went, until with one enormous stroke, the first woman sent the sky flying up, never to come close to the earth again.

She sensed a draft behind her neck and looked up. She was astonished to see that the sky had risen so high-and had taken her most precious things with it! She could see her silver comb shining where the moon is now, and the beads of her lovely necklace twinkling all around it. Her golden ring was nowhere in sight. The first woman grumbled, “I should have worn those things again if I'd known they would go to waste.”