Hard Work stories

This is a small theme with an unusually clear split down the middle, and the two halves suit different children.

Effort you can watch

Little Red Hen plants, reaps, grinds and bakes in five minutes flat. The Elves and the Shoemaker is eight minutes about a man whose craft is rewarded by kindness, and The Enormous Turnip turns pulling into a family event. These are the ones to read to a child who is learning to finish things.

Cleverness doing the heavy lifting

Puss in Boots and Seven At One Blow both hand the prize to whoever thinks fastest, which is an honest complication. If your child points out that the cat did not really work for it, they are reading properly.

Between the two sits The Queer Little Baker Man, seven minutes and the odd one out on this page: the work in it is a gift shared rather than a task completed. It is the one to reach for when effort has become a sore subject in your house.

Several of these are cumulative: the same phrase comes round each time a new character joins in. The Gingerbread Man, The Enormous Turnip and Little Red Hen all work this way, and all three suit ages three to seven.

A toddler who can predict the next line is not bored, they are joining in, which is the whole value of the form. Our guide on why children want the same story every night explains what that repetition is doing and why it is worth indulging rather than steering away from.

Reading a repeating tale aloud

Slow down on the repeated line rather than speeding up, and leave a clear gap before the last word of it. Most children fill the gap within two or three readings. If yours does not, carry on filling it yourself without comment; joining in is an offer, not a test.

Two more in this theme reward the same treatment. Together We Are Good is seven gentle minutes about a town fixed by a great many small helpers, and The Three Dwarfs is five minutes with a rhythm a three-year-old picks up quickly.

The most interesting third of this theme is about work that earns something nobody should have wanted. These are for older listeners, roughly six upwards.

The Fisherman and His Wife is nine minutes of a wish granted too many times. Rumpelstiltskin is about labour nobody can explain and a price nobody should pay. The Pied Piper… and BUTTERFLIES! is ten minutes on what happens when a town will not pay for the job it asked for, and Why the Sea is Salt ends with a machine that nobody remembered to stop.

Several of the shortest come from Aesop, traditionally placed in the sixth century BC, and they are blunter than the folk tales beside them. If your child likes that bluntness, our guide to Aesop and his fables is a good next stop for you, and the fables hub for them.

The gentlest things on this page are the two garden tales, The Man Who Made The Trees Blossom and The Story of the Old Man Who Made Withered Trees to Flower. Both are about patience rather than effort, and both suit a child who is tired of being told to try harder. Neither has a villain in it, which on some nights is the only thing that matters.

This theme is a branch of bravery and courage; the nearest sibling is responsibility, where the subject is the promise rather than the labour. For more animals doing the work, farm stories overlaps heavily with this page.