All time of the day is story time for us; a story for breakfast, a story for lunch, a story to drink milk, a story for everything. These are unofficial story times, the official one being at the bed time. The bedtime stories are always nice stories i.e. moral stories or stories from Hindu mythology. Rest of the time the stories could be created by me, or could be incidents from the past. The stories generally have a moral where the virtuous is the final victor and the villain gets punished for his deeds. I have exhausted my large repository of stories and these days make it point to pick up a new story for the night.
Last night I read a story from the Hitopadesha and told her. A blind old vulture takes care of all the little birds in a huge banyan tree when the older ones go in search of food. A vile cat hatches a plan, befriends the vulture and eats up the young ones one by one. After a while the cat goes away. The parent birds suspect the absence of their little ones and on finding the bones decide the vulture to be the culprit. They peck at him and hurt him and throw him away.
But Prachi was not happy with this ending. The vulture was good and the evil cat had to be punished. So, then I added up a little bit from my pocket where the vulture goes and finds the wicked cat and pecks at his eyes and beats him. The cat finally gets lost in the forest and gets eaten up by rhino (This little bit was from Prachi’s pocket).
Generally during the breakfast I repeat her the previous night’s story. Today as I repeated the story she said, “Amma, today whenever I see any bird in the sky, I will scream and tell it that the cat ate its baby and not vulture.”
So much innocence!
For parents who want to venture into story telling, there is a nice series of moral stories called SriRam ‘s Moral story book . The stories are very simple and lots of pictures, good for starters. Even I read these books when I was a kid. I searched for these books in Bangalore and finally ended up buying them for Prachi in Puttur at the same old shop where I was bought these books. Most of the stories in these books are from Aesop’s fables.
Last night I read a story from the Hitopadesha and told her. A blind old vulture takes care of all the little birds in a huge banyan tree when the older ones go in search of food. A vile cat hatches a plan, befriends the vulture and eats up the young ones one by one. After a while the cat goes away. The parent birds suspect the absence of their little ones and on finding the bones decide the vulture to be the culprit. They peck at him and hurt him and throw him away.
But Prachi was not happy with this ending. The vulture was good and the evil cat had to be punished. So, then I added up a little bit from my pocket where the vulture goes and finds the wicked cat and pecks at his eyes and beats him. The cat finally gets lost in the forest and gets eaten up by rhino (This little bit was from Prachi’s pocket).
Generally during the breakfast I repeat her the previous night’s story. Today as I repeated the story she said, “Amma, today whenever I see any bird in the sky, I will scream and tell it that the cat ate its baby and not vulture.”
So much innocence!
For parents who want to venture into story telling, there is a nice series of moral stories called SriRam ‘s Moral story book . The stories are very simple and lots of pictures, good for starters. Even I read these books when I was a kid. I searched for these books in Bangalore and finally ended up buying them for Prachi in Puttur at the same old shop where I was bought these books. Most of the stories in these books are from Aesop’s fables.
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