The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
15 min read ages 7 and up
American tales
4 tales
The Gingerbread Man
4 min read ages 3 and up
The Little Red Hen
7 min read ages 3 and up
Rip Van Winkle
15 min read ages 6 and up
Irving’s Hudson Valley and two nursery tales
Washington Irving, an American, wrote Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow for The Sketch Book. Both are set in the Hudson Valley, yet he wrote them in Birmingham, England, while staying with his sister in 1818 and 1819.
Rip Van Winkle falls asleep in the mountains and wakes twenty years later to a village that has moved on without him. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a ghost story with a headless horseman, better suited to older children and a dark autumn evening.
The Gingerbread Man first appeared in St. Nicholas, a children’s magazine published in New York, in 1875. Every time someone new chases him, the rhyme he calls out grows by another line, which makes it easy for a child to say along with the reader.
The Little Red Hen works the same way, with one question asked again and again until everyone is waiting for the answer. Both nursery tales suit the youngest listeners. Every story on this page can be read for free, retold from an old public-domain text.