Kids love bedtime stories. Whether it’s travelling to magical worlds, learning new things or going on adventures, bedtime stories for kids are the best.
With stories that are possibly true, children love to hear bedtime stories from their mother or father.
Reading bedtime stories for kids makes them love books and become a reader themselves, which is quite good habit.
Not only does children’s bedtime stories make them sleep, but also sharpens their memories, improves languages and strengthens their creativity.
Perhaps, the best way to help kids explore, express, and understand emotion is much more via short bedtime stories.
Let’s admit kids are always active, and it can be very hard to put them to sleep at times. So, most parents choose bedtime stories for kids to make them sleep early.
In this article, we have prepared some of the short bedtime stories for kids which might be very helpful:
The Ugly Duckling
The ugly duckling is one of the classic bedtime stories for kids with a moral.
The story is of a duck who is not accepted by his own family, including his mother because he is ugly.
Also, this bedtime story deals with the concept of appearance, and emphasizes on the fact that beauty doesn’t mean superiority.
Additionally, it portrays the struggles of an ugly duckling and the challenges faced by it due to its appearance.
Friends Forever
This is again one of the popular bedtime stories for kids. It is about the friendship between a frog and a mouse.
Friends forever shows how your actions against others can backfire on yourself.
“Don’t dig too deep a pit for your enemy, you may fall into it yourself” is the saying this story teaches.
Hare and The Tortoise
Everyone might be aware about the popular bedtime story for children named hare and the tortoise.
In this story the hare is defeated by the tortoise in a race proving the proverb “Slow and steady wins the race”.
It is a bedtime story with a moral that you should not give up, no matter what the circumstance arises.
But the story doesn’t end there as they eventually have another race. And it consists of a number of morals your children should learn about.
The Ant and The Grasshopper
This is another children’s bedtime stories from Aesop’s Fables. The story talks about the importance of hard work and planning for the future.
The story is about a lazy grasshopper who doesn’t work and a colony of ants who work hard collecting food.
This story is totally based on the concept of working hard in the present for a prosperous future.
Through this short bedtime story, children will understand the need, importance and benefit of hard work.
Beauty and The Beast
This is one of the famous children’s bedtime stories that tells you to look past outward appearances.
The story is based on a concept of giving more importance to a person’s good nature.
Through this short bedtime story, your kid will understand the meaning of love and kindness in the world.
With a happy ending of the beast and the girl getting married, your kids will learn to stay positive.
Foolish Imitation
This bedtime story involves the attempts of a foolish crow to imitate every aspect of a hawk.
The major theme of this story is the importance of originality in every one’s life and the drawback of imitating.
The story explains to children that it’s better to be yourself than to mimic others in various ways.
The Hungry Mouse
This short bedtime story is for kids having a great moral. It talks about how greed can get people into bad situations.
The story features a greedy mouse who was starving and had not eaten in days. He eats all the food and gets fat and stuck inside the basket.
The story explains to children that it’s better not to have anything than to be greedy.
The morale of the story is, if you be so much greedy then you will fall under a trap someday.
A City Rat and A Village Rat
This is a short bedtime story for kids. It draws a parallel between the peaceful nature of living in villages versus the stressful nature of city.
The story features rats as central characters facing the difference between village and city life.
By observing the portrayals of two different lifestyles, children can start to understand about the real world.
Lion and The Mouse
This is one of the short children’s bedtime stories that explains the proverb “Small acts of kindness will be rewarded greatly.”
This bedtime story features a lion and a mouse and how anyone regardless of their size and appearance, can make a major impact in certain situations.
It teaches your kids to appreciate others and create a helping tendency in their minds.
The Boy Who Cried Wolf
This bedtime story for kids is from Aesop’s Fables and impresses the importance of being truthful.
The story features a small shepherd boy who watched a flock of sheep near his village.
In order to make the villagers fool, he cries about a wolf coming to eat his sheep and him every time.
Later, when the real wolf arrives and eats all his sheep, none of the villagers come to protect him because of his lies.
The main plot is centered around how the habit of lying affects a shepherd boy.
By observing the lying nature of the kid, this bedtime story will teach your kids about the consequences of telling lies.
The Golden Goose
This is one of the short bedtime stories for kids about a farmer who had a goose that was laying one golden egg every day.
One day due to his greed he cuts of the goose for having all the golden eggs present inside his stomach.
The farmer neither gets any golden egg nor his goose alive like before for laying any egg.
As the story goes on, it focuses on the themes of greed and how it can ruin anyone’s life.
The Honest Woodcutter
This children’s bedtime story is based on the moral “Honesty is the best policy”.
The story involves a poor woodcutter who loses his axe in a river and cries all day to get it back for his daily activities.
When the God arrives and shows him axes made of gold and silver, he denies them being his and takes the original one.
Then the God gets impressed by his honestly and gifts him all the axes and lived happily ever after.
Through this bedtime story, children will understand how they will get appreciated and rewarded if they live with honesty.
Oh, The Places You’ll Go
This is a book full of rhyming verses and colorful illustration. This doesn’t belong to bedtime stories for kids, but probably good one to make them sleep.
It tells children that life is a balance of both, good and bad things, but can be fun if you want it to be.
Each verse tells children about different stages of life and the choices they can make to deal with various situations they face.
The book teaches the children that they have to decide where to go and what to do in life.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
This is one of those lovely bedtime stories for kids with colorful pictures. It has colorful illustrations and differently shaped pages, with holes showing the caterpillar’s trail through various foods.
The story features a red-faced caterpillar who has a huge feast of one piece each, of chocolate care, ice-cream cone, pickle, salami, and many other food.
He gets bad stomach after eating all those food, and after returning to his regular diet, he feels far better.
This bedtime story book teaches little children about numbers, names of various foods, days of the week, and the life cycle of a butterfly.
I’m Bored
This is another short bedtime story for kids. It is about a girl who whines about boredom until she meets a potato.
The potato tells her that kids are boring and the little girl tries to prove the potato that kids are fun.
This story is a way to remind children of all the fun things they can do when they are bored.
Also, the story can be interactive if you ask your kids to recount all the fun things that he/she like to do.
