A little hunter shoots a duck for his wife to roast, then fumbles his second shot at the drake. It's a comic ballad with a jaunty triple rhyme running through every line, though the hunting is worth knowing about before reading to sensitive listeners.
From Mother Goose / Nursery Rhymes (traditional). See the whole collection.
There was a little man, and he had a little gun,
And his bullets were made of lead, lead, lead;
He went to the brook, and saw a little duck,
And shot it right through the head, head, head.
He carried it home to his old wife Joan,
And bade her a fire to make, make, make.
To roast the little duck he had shot in the brook,
And he'd go and fetch the drake, drake, drake.
The drake was a-swimming with his curly tail;
The little man made it his mark, mark, mark.
He let off his gun, but he fired too soon,
And the drake flew away with a quack, quack, quack.
About this rhyme
Rhyme alternates plain lines with triple-repeat lines ('lead, lead, lead', 'head, head, head', 'make, make, make'), not every line. · Story matches: little man shoots a duck, carries it home to 'his old wife Joan', has her make a fire to roast it.
"A Little Man" tells a whole small story in a few lines: a man shoots a duck, carries it home, and gets his wife to cook it. The repeated words at the end of every other line, lead, lead, lead, head, head, head, are what make it fun to say aloud rather than just read.
Let a child join in on the third repeat once they catch the pattern.
Public domain. Text from The Real Mother Goose (Blanche Fisher Wright, 1916), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition