English · Beginner
Read Five Children and It in Englishwith every sentence explained
E. Nesbit · 1902
Free to start · iPhone, iPad & Mac
About the book
Five Children and It by E. Nesbit was first published in 1902. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked beginner and filed under children and fantasy. It runs to about 53,400 words.
A grumpy sand-fairy. One wish a day. And every wish goes wonderfully wrong.
Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane and their baby brother, the Lamb, have just moved from London to a house in the countryside. While digging in an old gravel pit, the children uncover a very strange creature: a furry, cross, thousands-of-years-old Psammead, with eyes on long stalks like a snail's.
The Psammead agrees to grant them one wish every day, which lasts until sunset. What could be better? But the children soon learn that wishes are tricky things. Wishing to be "beautiful as the day" means no one recognises them. A pile of gold turns out to be impossible to spend. And wings are wonderful, until the sun starts going down while you are stuck on a church tower.
Funny, clever and full of magic, E. Nesbit's 1902 classic shaped a century of children's fantasy.
- Author
- E. Nesbit
- First published
- 1902
- Language
- English
- Level
- Beginner
- Genre
- Children, Fantasy
- Length
- About 53,400 words
How it opens
The house was three miles from the station, but before the dusty hired fly had rattled along for five minutes the children began to put their heads out of the carriage window and to say, 'Aren't we nearly there?' And every time they passed a house, which was not very often, they all said, 'Oh, is THIS it?' But it never was, till they reached the very top of the hill, just past the chalk-quarry and before you come to the gravel-pit. And then there was a white house with a green garden and an orchard beyond, and mother said, 'Here we are!'
Reading Five Children and It in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked beginner, so it's a good first whole book if you know the basics of English and want something you can finish. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
