When I was a child I enjoyed my mom's bedtime stories so much, and even now I can still remember some of them. Now it's my turn to pass such a wonderful experience down to my daughter. However I am having a hard time looking for quality bedtime stories and every night I have to spend almost half of an hour googling.
How much time do you spend a day on bedtime stories? Can you recommend any place that I can find good materials?
Since you don't provide an age, there are a few different guidelines based on age.
For children under about eight or nine months, stories primarily serve the purpose of hearing the parent's voice, as a soothing influence and helping to develop language. Therefore, any story will do. Books primarily should be high contrast, black and white in particular or very bright colors with few variations (ie, an entirely green turtle, not one with various lines of different colors that is more realistic).
Between nine months and two years or so, they often enjoy books with pictures (in particular, photographs) that they can identify. Books with lots of pictures of trains or trucks if they're a transportation kid, animals if that's their thing, etc.; ABC, color, or number books; or "Baby's First Word" books are all good here. Stories in terms of plotted stories won't be very effective, because they won't understand the concept of plot or know why they should listen, and they don't necessarily want to go in order.
After about two and a half years, varying based on the child, you can start having plot-intensive stories. Fairy tales, Curious George or Clifford or other characters, Dr Seuss, etc. are all fair game. They'll like to listen to the story, and begin to be able to discuss some of the elements of the story. Some children will even begin to role-play around 3 based on the stories; my three year old likes to make up stories of his own, where he's a main character alongside Curious George or similar.
Once they hit the age that 'plot' stories make sense, and you manage to find out what they enjoy (by trial and error, most likely), I like the idea of taking formulaic stories that they enjoy book versions of, and make up your own versions. This doesn't require any preparation other than knowing what the formula is from having read quite a few. My son likes Curious George; for that, the formula is:
You can make that up that 'on the go' pretty easily, even if you're not creative (I am absolutely not!). Several of the other book series work similarly, as well as Aesop's Fables and some of Grimm's fairy tales: there is a fairly simple formula that anyone can follow, just filling in the details around the formula. The nice thing is that kids don't care too much about the actual quality of writing - so just make it customized to the kid, and you're all square.
For example, one story I'd tell my son (let's call him R) goes something like this:
This is George and R. They were good little guys, and always very curious. One day, George and R were going to the store. The Man with the Yellow Hat came by to pick R up, and he was very happy to get in the blue car and go. They drove up to the store, and R and George got out. After they went in the store, they got a shopping cart, and R got in. George pushed R around in the cart for a while, then they traded places.
The Man with the Yellow Hat needed Sugar, Baking Powder, Chocolate Chips, and flour, to bake the cookies they wanted to bake. While they went past the cookie aisle, George saw something he liked, and ran off. R followed him, and said "No George, don't run away!" George stopped, and saw a little boy crying in the aisle. R couldn't find the Man with the Yellow Hat, so he found a worker at the store, and told him the boy was missing his mommy.
The worker paged the boy's mommy over the intercom, and his mommy came by a little later, and everyone was happy. The Man with the Yellow Hat also came, and told George that he shouldn't run off, but that he was happy George and R knew what to do to help the little boy. They went to the checkout and bought the ingredients, then went home and baked cookies together. R got to eat the first one out of the oven, and it was very yummy
I wrote that in about 3 minutes, and largely copied off of a similar story I read frequently (George goes to the Baseball Game, or something titled like that). It has elements of my son in it - he likes to run down aisles, like every kid - and elements I like to teach him (asking a store worker if he's lost). It also has a lot of 'hooks' for him to interject details - for example, he can provide the details of the shopping list, and what they're making at home, or the store's name, or what aisle George ran down. It's also a terrible story from an adult perspective, but it's loads of fun for a three year old.
What's nice about doing it this way is not only that you have a story wherever you want, and you involve the child; but also that it encourages the child to make up his/her own stories (both by involving him/her in the process, and by modeling the process). I found that more and more of the story would be made up by my son in this process as we went along - starting by just adding a few hooks for him to add, but as we went on he'd insist on more and more details, and as long as I didn't resist too much it worked well.
Adding a bit for older kids, there are formulas you can use even for quite complex stories. If your kids like Tolkien, there is a common Tolkien-ish formula. Here's my approximation of it:
You could watch Star Wars, read (or watch!) Lord of the Rings, or read countless fantasy books and see this same formula used over and over again. Some stick more closely to it - see Terry Brooks or David Eddings, both of whom unabashedly stick to it fairly tightly - perhaps the closest of which is Star Wars itself. I am not going to replicate this here due to space and time constraints (and I'm pretty terrible as an author), but it's not all that hard to replicate - and in fact, many D&D games that are more on the storytelling side end up replicating this (often intentionally). By 8 or 10 you could easily do something like this with your children, and involve them (perhaps with some roleplaying aspects, perhaps not) and have a lot of fun.
There are also other formulas; famously, most romance novels published by Silhouette or Harlequin are explicitly formulaic (they are expected to follow certain formulas). See Wikipedia for some details and examples.
I always asked my dad for stories from when he was younger. He had the most fantastic stories about his experiences in the Navy. He's not very imaginative so I (still!) believe they're reasonably true.
He probably didn't spend more than 10 minutes per evening, often followed by a little discussion about some detail or other.
Perhaps you can dig up some of your best bar brag stories and use those as a basis?
I firmly believe that kids love repetition, so don't strain yourself trying do dig up new material all the time. Find a small handful of stories she likes and every evening, give her the choice which one to tell.
We also watch some short movies (5-10 minutes) right before bedtime. There's a Pixar short called "La Luna" that I like to recite from memory. Sometimes, if I want participation from my kiddo, I leave out some bit, or I ask what that next bit was going to be.
My kids are 10, 4, and 2.5 and we read or tell stories for about 15-20 minutes a night with the younger two. My ten year old prefers to read to himself now, but he got the same amount of time when he was younger.
My kids typically want to be read to because they like to look at pictures in books, but sometimes if it's late I will do a story so we can turn the lights out. Our stories are always recollections that we talk about together. So, it's actually less story telling and more conversation, but that's only because my kids can't help but take an opportunity to correct me if they think I'm not remembering clearly. For instance, I will talk about the time my 4YO and I went to "the little waterfall" as if I'm telling the 2.5YO about it and his brother isn't there. I will pause and let my 4YO finish a thought, or I'll say something silly like "and there was a purple frog on the rock" and let him correct me. Sometimes he'll go along with it. The point is that it usually starts out a true story they both or at least one of them knows and then we change it. All my kids enjoy this and it's very easy to do. You already have memories and experiences, you just have to get a little creative with it. Little kids like to know how the story goes (for this reason they ask you to read the same book a hundred million times till it gets "lost" because you can't take it anymore), but they also like to go off on a tangent too.
The other option you could try is poetry. I have about ten or eleven poems memorized that my kids like. They are ones I liked as a child, which is why I know them. Some are kid poems, some aren't. Either way, they have either a pleasant cadence, an interesting word or phrase, or an easy rhyme. Lewis Carroll, Shel Silverstein, and Edward Lear are a few of my favorites. Poetry is pretty easy to memorize, in my opinion, and easy to have fun with. You can swap out a different word that rhymes (or when your child is old enough, ask her to do think if a word), and you can play with the tempo and use voices to mix things up.
The point is, more or less, the best place to find materials is right in your own head, in your own life. It shouldn't be like work, or else it'll be as interesting as a PowerPoint presentation at work. Just have fun! It does take practice, but you'll get the hang of it.
My mother would read books to me. A good book would solve your problem in that you wouldn't need to spend a lot of time each day/week.
You can probably find great deals on some good books via Craigslist or garage sales. There's plenty of "top books for children" lists. The following is a google search to get you started. Go with some all time favs and you can't go wrong...
At the risk of being harpooned by the community, I'll tell you what I did for my daughter.
When she was about 3 or so she noticed a little character I painted in the mural that covers her whole room. Tons of animals and every sort of environment and nothing human related at all, except I hid the predator in the trees of the jungle. That's what she asked about. So I thought about the story of the predator, yes, the schwarzenegger movie, and how you might go about telling that story to a 3 year old.
I cleaned it up a bit - not remembering just how vulgar that movie actually was - and told it as I remember. I don't know if that was a huge mistake or not because she loved it and asked me to tell the story of the predator every night for about a year. Eventually she would tell it to me, which is hilarious to hear a 3 year old's version.
It occurred to me sometime in this fiasco that there are an astounding number of movies I really like, and no real reason why I can't tell her my version of any of them. Try as I might though, she always asks for the ones that you would never expect. The Predator was her favorite so much so that she asked to be the predator for Halloween, which I gladly made for her. She could have won a cosplay award.
I usually told the whole story in about 15 minutes. Some movies are harder to strip down, but it's usually in that range.
I think it also helped her imagination seeing me just tell stories instead of always needing to read them out of a book.
