The Wooden Doll

- By W.K Clifford, Adapted by Michael Signal
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The Wooden Doll


1 The wooden doll had no peace. “If only I were a different kind of doll,” she thought. A soft rag doll could tear. A fragile china doll might easily break. Anything in the world would be better than a good, strong wooden doll with a painted head and movable joints. A good, strong wooden doll was a sad thing to be.
 
2 Sometimes the poor doll wished to be a toy train, or a set of building blocks, or a woolly lamb. Being anything else on Earth would be better than being a wooden doll. The wooden doll never had any peace. Children and grown up humans picked it up and put it down at all hours of the day and night. They made it go to bed when the children went to bed, get up when they got up, be bathed when they were bathed, dressed when they were dressed, taken out in all weather, stuffed into their backpacks when they went to school. It was left in lonely corners, dropped on stairs, forgotten, neglected, bumped, banged, broken, and glued together.
 
3 “I might as well just be a human being!” the doll thought, and then it began to think about human beings and what strange creatures they were, always going about, but all on their own. No one even carried humans, except for tiny human babies. Human beings were always sleeping and waking, and eating and drinking, and laughing and crying, and talking and walking, and doing this and that and the other, never resting for long together. Those poor humans could not be still for even a single day.
 
4 “They are always making a noise,” thought the wooden doll. “They are always talking and walking about, always moving things and doing things, building up and tearing down, and making and unmaking forever and forever, and never are they quiet. It is lucky that we are not all human beings, or the world would be worn out in no time, and there would not be a corner left in the world for a poor doll to rest its head.”

Current Page: 1

GRADE:4

Word Lists:

Fragile : (of an object) easily broken or damaged

Human : relating to or characteristic of people or human beings

Forever : for all future time; for always

Neglected : suffering a lack of proper care

Joint : a point at which parts of an artificial structure are joined

Tiny : very small

Corner : a place or angle where two or more sides or edges meet

Lonely : sad because one has no friends or company

Weather : the state of the atmosphere at a place and time as regards heat, dryness, sunshine, wind, rain, etc.

Creature : an animal, as distinct from a human being

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Additional Information:

Rating: A Words in the Passage: 360 Unique Words: 166 Sentences: 24
Noun: 73 Conjunction: 40 Adverb: 39 Interjection: 0
Adjective: 41 Pronoun: 24 Verb: 86 Preposition: 24
Letter Count: 1,509 Sentiment: Positive Tone: Neutral Difficult Words: 56
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