Synopses & Reviews
Chapter One
Harvesting Time
The wheat was ripe in Pa's fields near the little house where Laura lived with her Ma and Pa and her sisters, Mary and Carrie. It was harvest time in the Big Woods of Wisconsin. That was a busy time for Pa and Ma. But then Laura couldn't think of any time of year that wasn't busy. Running a farm, even a little one, was a lot of work.
Right now it was time to gather nuts from the hickory trees and the hazelnut bushes. The garden vegetables must be picked and stored away. Laura and her big sister, Mary, helped pull up the long yellow carrots and the round purple topped turnips. They helped Pa dig up the potatoes, and they helped Ma cook pumpkin for pumpkin pies.
When the grain got ripe in the fields, Uncle Henry came to cut their tall wheat stalks. Laura loved those days, because she got to see her cousins and her aunt Polly. Ma and Aunt Polly worked in the house, and all the cousins played together in the yard till dinnertime.
After the oats were cut, Ma took several bundles of them and put them in a tub of water to soften them. Then she braided the straws into long ropes. When all the straws were braided, she sewed the braids around and around to make hats for the whole family. Laura liked to watch Ma. She learned how to braid the straw and she made a little hat for her doll, Charlotte.
One frosty morning, four horses came up the road, pulling a machine. Two men rode on top of it.
The horses pulled the machine into the field where Pa and Uncle Henry and Grandpa had stacked their wheat. Two more men came, with another machine. This one was smaller.
Pa called out to Ma. The threshers had come!
The men had come to thresh the wheat.Threshing was separating the, grains of wheat, which could be ground into flour for baking, from the straw. Always before, Pa had done all the threshing by hand, and it was long, slow work. But today the threshers were bringing a machine to help.
Pa hurried out to the field with his horses. Ma said Laura and Mary could go, too, if they were careful not to get in the way.
Uncle Henry came riding up. He tied his horse to a tree. Then he and Pa hitched all the other horses to the smaller machine. They hitched each pair of horses to the end of a long stick that came out from the center of the machine. A long iron rod lay on the ground, from the small machine to the big one.
Later Pa told Laura and Mary that the big machine was called the separator. The long iron rod was called the tumbling rod. The little machine was called the horsepower. Eight horses were hitched to it to make it go, so this was an eight-horsepower machine.
A man sat on top of the horsepower. When everything was ready, he clucked to the horses. They started to walk in a circle, around and around. Each team pulled on the long stick to which it was hitched. Their pulling made the tumbling rod roll over and over on the ground.
The tumbling rod moved the gears of the separator. The separator stood beside the stack of wheat.
All of this turning and tumbling made a huge noise. It was a racket of banging and clanging. Laura and Mary held tight to each other's hands. They had never seen such a machine before. They had never heard such a racket.
Pa and Uncle Henry climbed on top of the wheat stack. They tossed bundles of wheat down onto a board. A man stood at the board and cut the bands on the bundles. One byone he shoved the bundles into a hole at the end of the separator.
The hole looked like the separator's mouth. It had long iron teeth. The teeth were chewing. They chewed the bundles, and the separator swallowed them. Straw blew out at the separator's other end. And out of a hole in its side poured hundreds of grains of wheat.
Two men were trampling the straw and shaping it into a stack. One man was putting the grain into sacks.
All the men were working as fast as they possibly could. The machine kept right up with them. Laura and Mary were so excited, they could hardly breathe. The horses walked around and around, and the golden straw blew out in a golden cloud. The wheat streamed golden-brown out of the spout. Pa and Uncle Henry kept pitching the bundles down.
Laura and Mary watched as long as they could. Then they ran back to the house to help Ma get dinner for all those men.
The men stopped at noon to gobble down the big dinner Ma had made. They were very hungry from the hard work. Then they went back to the machines in the fields, to finish the threshing.
Synopsis
Gentle adaptations of Laura Ingalls Wilder's celebrated Little House stories have been gathered together here in two new titles in our Little House Chapter Book series.Frontier life wasn't always easy, and in Hard Times on the Prairie, Laura and her family struggle against prairie fires, grasshoppers, and winter blizzards. But with their fighting pioneer spirit, the Ingalls family always manages to make it through the hardest of hard times.In Little House Farm Days, Laura has to do her part to help run the Ingalls family farm. From helping Pa smoke meat to planting seeds and making cheese with Ma, Laura is a big help. Pa doesn't know what he'd do without her!With simple text, entertaining stories, and Renee Graef's beautiful black-and-white artwork, Little House Chapter Books are the perfect way to introduce beginning chapter book readers to the world of Little House.
About the Author
Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in 1867 in the log cabin described in
Little House in the Big Woods. She and her family traveled by covered wagon across the Midwest. Later, Laura and her husband, Almanzo Wilder, made their own covered-wagon trip with their daughter, Rose, to Mansfield, Missouri. There, believing in the importance of knowing where you began in order to appreciate how far you've come, Laura wrote about her childhood growing up on the American frontier. For millions of readers Laura lives on forever as the little pioneer girl in the beloved Little House books.
Renée Graef received her bachelor's degree in art from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is the illustrator of numerous titles in the Little House publishing program, as well as Rodgers and Hammerstein's My Favorite Things and E.T.A Hoffman's The Nutcracker, adapted by Janet Schulman. She lives in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, with her husband and two children.