Kindness stories

The Queen Bee shows kindness to animals paying off. Simpleton protects an anthill, the ducks and a bees’ nest from his brothers, and later the ants find the pearls, the ducks bring up the key and the queen bee picks the right princess.

In Cinderella the bird in the hazel tree helps a girl who stayed good and kind, as her dying mother asked. Our version follows the Grimms, so the stepsisters cut their feet to fit the slipper and the doves blind them. Read it yourself first.

The Golden Goose begins with a shared meal. Dummling offers his ash-cake and sour beer to a little gray man his brothers turned away, and everything that follows, the goose and the line of people stuck to it, comes from that one choice.

Thumbelina is tiny, yet she covers a frozen swallow with a blanket of hay and nurses him all winter without telling anyone. In spring he flies off, and on her wedding day he comes back for her. Ask your child whether she expected him to.