"That will be enough! There's too much chatterwalling going on here. We have a lot to do today." Miz Bella spoke calmly but sternly as her eyes swept over the faces in the classroom.
"Put the chalk down, Willie," she commanded. "You're not to start your work until I say so. And, as to the other," she added. "You have incorrect information. 'Twas not a dragon. I have never seen a dragon in my life, other than those in the pages of a book. But 'twas a very large and ferocious black bear back in the New Lands."
"A bear? Miz Bella, you saw a bear?" one of the voices piped up from the back of the classroom.
"'Saw' a bear? I did more than see it. I stood some twenty feet away and killed him with my bow. Or," she added modestly, "at least I brought him down with an arrow, and the others rushed in for the final attack. He was up on his hind legs about to maul my friend. So, of course, I had to do something. You see, this bear had been bothering the families in camp for some time so they sent out a party to track him down. I was a sturdy tweener at the time. Of couse, I wasn't supposed to go along but I followed them in secret. They discovered me after a day's march, when they were too far out to send me home."
"Funny, isn't it," Miz Bella mused. "The worst part of that day wasn't killing the bear. It was slogging on to find him. There were hugh expanses of open bog with no cover surrounded by large tracks of impenetrable tuck. That meant we had to push through endless miles of bog hoping to find the animal in the open. At one point the bog was six feet deep, way over my head. But we kept going and finally chanced on him where he had stopped to pull fish out of a muddy pond."
An anonymous voice was heard from the back of the room, "You're too little. You couldn't have killed a bear."
"Believe it or not, but that is a true story." Miz Bella opened the drawer of her desk and took out a wooden box. She removed the box lid and unwrapped the object, which was tucked inside a cloth, and then held it up for the class to see. It was a carving of a ferocious black bear, fashioned out of sandstone. "My friend gave me this to thank me. And he taught me to make carvings like these because I love to work with my hands. But enough of that. It's time for letters."
Miz Bella walked over to a large slate and wrote the following letters in chalk:
And then she wrote this:
She drew a picture of a large bear on the wall slate and sounded out each of the letters separately. She even showed how certain letters could be put in different comninations to make another word like "bare" or "bar".
"Alright now. Copy these letters onto your slate. I want everyone to do this ten times. When you have finished, you may come to my desk and bring your slate for checking. Camille and Marigold, I still need you to explain about those books. The rest of you get busy."