Farm stories

Hens, oxen, dogs and horses do the moral work in this collection, and they do it briefly. The Dog in the Manger is the ten-minute one about refusing to share what you cannot use. The Ass and the Lapdog is six minutes on wanting somebody else's life. Both are retellings of Aesop fables and both make their point without a lecture.

If the moral is the reason you are here, our guide to morals in children's stories is about how to let one land without turning the evening into a lesson.

The unfamiliar ones worth trying

The Heifer and the Ox is six minutes about two animals who envy each other's day, and it is quietly one of the best things here for a child with a sibling. The Horse and the Groom is seven minutes on being looked after properly, and The Cock and the Jewel at eight makes the case for wanting what is actually useful to you.

Little Red Hen is five minutes, marked funny, and it is the compact telling: nobody helps, so nobody eats. Hey Diddle Diddle, Little Red Hen runs to nine and folds the rhyme in with the tale, which suits a three to seven year old who likes a refrain to join in with.

Which one on which night

Take the five-minute version when you want the point made quickly, and the nine-minute one when your child will actually sing along. A child who chants the repeated lines is reading with you, whatever it looks like.

This is the calmest collection on the site by mood: eleven of the fifteen are marked gentle. The Farmer and the Stork and The Farmer and the Fox are four minutes each and listed from age three. The Pea Blossom at five minutes is about patience and growing, and it ends softly enough to close the evening.

The Farmer and the Pixie is the outlier at nine minutes: still gentle, but with magic in it, and it is the one for a Friday.

What makes these unusually good last stories is that nothing in them is at stake overnight. A hen bakes bread, a stork is caught with the cranes, a pea grows in a windowbox. Nobody is lost in a wood, and nobody needs rescuing before morning.

Several of the animals here have collections of their own. Bird stories takes the cockerels and cranes further, dog stories gathers the loyal ones, and fox stories follows the thief who keeps turning up at the gate.

If the appeal is really the shortness, the five-minute bedtime stories page runs the same filter across the whole site, and Aesop's fables collects the source of half this collection. Fifteen is small enough to work through in a fortnight.