HomeMy WebLinkAboutRead Aloud Book Gr. 1-Lesson 27Do you know what you want to be when you grow up? Whatever you
choose, it is important to become a person with many skills. When you have a
skill, this means you know how to do something very well.
School is a great place to fi nd out what skills you have. Knowing what you’re
good at will teach you more about yourself. It will make it easier for you to
decide what you’d like to be when you grow up.
School can also teach you good habits that will be helpful when you’re older.
For example, if you work hard on a school project, you can learn how to focus
and do your best. Or when you help another student, you can learn what it
means to work together. All these things will help you be great at whatever job
you choose.
One day, you might want to have a professional job. You might want to
become a doctor or a lawyer. To have a job like this, you must go to school for
many years. You would need to go to high school, and then college. Then you
would need to continue in school to earn other degrees. A degree shows that
the person who earned it has learned a lot about a subject. People with degrees
have special qualifi cations, or talents, that allow them to do diffi cult jobs.
It takes more than years of studying for someone to be great at a job. To do
well, people should be willing to do hard work. Usually, someone who becomes
the president of a company will be a man or woman who was willing to work
very hard to get to the top. Someone like a school principal must also be ready
to put in a lot of time and effort to lead a school.
You have a lot of time to decide what you want to do when you become an
adult. But it’s a very good idea to think of school as the place where you can
start learning about who you are and what you want to be. This doesn’t mean
that you can’t have fun along the way. But it does mean that you should think
of each skill you learn at school as something you’ll need in order to be the
best you can be later on.
COMPREHENSION Why is it important to work hard at school? What do
degrees show about the people who earn them?
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People sometimes think of ideas for inventions, or new creations, in the most
surprising ways.
For example, one day in 1948, a man named George de Mestral took his
dog for a walk. Once he got home, he saw that his pants and the dog’s fur
were covered with burs—rough, prickly shells of seeds. The seeds must have
clung to them while they were walking past plants and fl owers. Most people
would have simply picked the burs off their clothing and out of the dog’s fur.
But George de Mestral was a special kind of genius. He thoughtfully looked at
one of the burs under a microscope. He saw that the bur had hundreds of tiny
hooks. The hooks are what helped the burs cling to his pants and the dog’s fur.
The man fi gured he could do something useful with hooks like that. They
gave him a mental image of how he could turn these annoying pests into
helpful tools. He decided he would make a new kind of fastener to hold things
together. One part of the fastener would be full of tiny hooks, like the bur. The
other part would be full of tiny loops. When someone pressed the two parts
together, the hooks would attach themselves to the loops. He would call his
new gadget Velcro.
At fi rst, no one could imagine that Velcro would become an important
invention. But it did, and George de Mestral became very rich. Think of all the
places you use Velcro!
This true story shows one big difference between an ordinary person and a
genius. Most people would have just complained about the burs. But this man
wondered about them. He wondered how the burs worked. He took the time to
discover their secret. Then he had a wonderful idea.
Sometimes, a little bit of curiosity goes a long way.
COMPREHENSION What words help you understand what led to George
de Mestral’s invention? How does Velcro work?
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