wheat, oats, or barley.” His eyes were fixed on the tin tray where the farmer sometimes spread some
grain. He stared and stared at the tray, growing hungrier by the second.
Overhearing the five little chickens’ wishes, Daddy Rooster called, “Come here.” Gathering the
five little chickens around him, he continued, “Have you noticed what Mommy Hen and I do when
we are hungry? If you want breakfast, follow us out into the garden patch. There you can learn to
scratch and peck for your own food like we do.”
STORY 6
COME UP LAUGHINGTherapeutic Characteristics
Problems Addressed
■ Meeting the unexpected
■ Being stunned or knocked back
■ Having your path blockedResources Developed
■ Laughing
■ Relating with laughter and joy
■ Seeing the funny sideOutcomes Offered
■ Laughter
■ Positivity
Something interesting happened at my home recently. Where I live, in a hillside suburb, I am
lucky to be surrounded by a lot of trees, and even luckier that those trees are home to a variety of
birds. One of those birds is called the laughing kookaburra. It is actually a big kingfisher, but that
doesn’t mean that it lives just on fish. In fact, I don’t know that it eats fish at all. It certainly does like
to catch snakes and lizards in its strong and powerful beak.
The kookaburra’s head and chest are white whereas its wings and back are rusty brown with blue
tinges along the edges of its wings. If I put out scraps of meat on a feed tray the kookaburras fly down
to eat them and, at times, land on my arm to eat from my hand. However, I think the thing I love most
about the kookaburras is the way that they laugh at sunset. My bird book describes their call as a “loud
chuckling laugh.” Often they laugh in chorus with each other so that their merriment ripples around
the twilit trees a bit like the “wave” the fans do at a sporting event. I believe they do this to establish the
boundaries of their territory at night. How wonderful it would be to laugh yourself to sleep every night.
I mention kookaburras because of something interesting that happened at my home recently. I
was inside my home when there was a loud bang against a window. I walked out the door and around
the veranda to see what had happened. A kookaburra was sitting on the wooden floorboards of the
veranda, looking extremely stunned after having flown into the window. It must have seen the re-
flection of the trees and thought it was continuing to fly through the woods when it hit the glass and
Enriching Learning 53
ENRICHING LEARNING