Sing Me a Fable
Twenty-six fables in rhyme — one for every letter, and every little flaw a child can grow out of.
The Angry Boar is free to sing — no QR code needed. The rest open with the QR codes printed in the book.
Colours
Meadow
© 2026 Mihai Mike Baron · build 2026-08-11_1641
Sing along with the words as they light up.
The sing-along is still on its way
This one isn't ready yet. The song is free in the meantime — press the button below.
Free for everyone. Sing-along opens with the QR codes printed in the book.
Twenty-six fables, one for each letter and each little flaw, written in rhyme by Mihai Mike Baron. Every fable has a song. Scan the QR code on a fable's first page and the words light up so a child can sing it back.
Nothing here asks for a name, an email or an account. Progress stays on the device.
Mihai Mike Baron
Canadian-Romanian writer, living between Montreal, Florida and Romania.
Ten games, in the order a child grows into them. The first three need no reading at all. Nothing is timed, nothing is scored against another child, and nothing is saved anywhere but on this device. Tap one to play.
Ages 3–5 · no reading
Ages 3–6 · no reading
Ages 6–8 · early reading
Ages 7–10 · reading
Ages 4–8 · no reading needed
Ages 6–10 · reading
Ages 6–10 · drag and drop
Words that hurt
Words that help
Ages 7–10 · reading
Ages 4–8 · counting to 13, no reading needed
Join the dots from 1 to 13. Who is hiding?
Start at dot 1
Ages 4–10 · away from the screen
A deck of fifty-two cards is in production — the twenty-six animals, each with the flaw it is famous for, printed large enough to hold in a small hand.
Snap the Flaw. Deal the pack out face down. Players turn one card at a time into the middle. When two animals in a row share a colour, the first to slap the pile and name one of the two flaws takes it. Naming the flaw is the whole point: a child who plays this for an afternoon leaves knowing twenty-six words.
Who Am I. One player holds a card to her forehead without looking. The others act out the animal — the boar charging, the swan strutting — until she guesses. No reading, no counting, works from four up.
The Long Game. The cards carry ordinary ranks, so the pack plays snap, war, and patience like any other deck. The fables come along for free.
The deck is not on sale yet. When it is, it will be here.
The same animals, drawn in clean black outlines with plenty of white to fill in. Print a page, hand out the crayons, and let a child colour the boar while his song plays.
One fable, free to everyone. The Angry Boar’s six pages, ready to print.
⇩ Download the free fable — 6 pages
PDF · print at home, A4 or Letter
The whole book, for readers of the book. All twenty-six fables — one colouring page for every illustration — live at color.singmeafable.com. It opens with a word printed on the last page of your book, under the heading Colour the whole book. There you can print a page, a fable, or the whole book at home — as many times as you like, so a spilled glass of paint costs nothing.
Why colouring first. A child too young to read spends twenty minutes inside the picture and comes out knowing what the fable is about. That is the first step of the journey, before the words and long before the singing.
Twenty-six fables in rhyme, one for every letter and every small flaw a child grows out of.
Each fable runs six painted pages: the animal alone on its title page, four verses, and a moral at the end. A is the Angry Boar who charges before he looks; H is the Show-Off Pufferfish who puffs until nowhere is left to hide; Z is the My-Way Zebra who will not bend.
On this site every fable has its own page, reached by tapping its animal on the wheel. There you can play its song, and open its sing-along if you have the book.
The words light up in time with the music, on the same painted page the child is holding.
How it works. Each fable's first page carries a printed code. Scan it with a phone and that fable's sing-along opens — the verse appearing line by line as it is sung, so a child who cannot read yet follows the highlight and sings anyway.
What you need. The book. The songs themselves are free to everyone, here on the site; the sing-along is what the printed code opens.
Try it now, free. The Angry Boar's sing-along is open to everyone, with no code.
Quick games, for the minutes between things.
The Arcade is where the faster games will live — the ones a child plays standing up, waiting for dinner, with one thumb. They are being built now.
What is already playable sits in Games: ten of them, from finding a letter to finishing a moral.
Twelve activities built on the twenty-six fables, for a room of children at free play with a grown-up watching. Most need nothing but the songs and a bit of floor. Each one runs five to fifteen minutes and stops cleanly, so none of them has to be finished.
You need: one song playing out loud, and room to move
Play a fable's song. While it plays, every child moves as that animal — the boar charging low and heavy, the swan gliding with its chin up, the hare darting and stopping. When the song ends, everyone freezes. Ask one child, not the whole group: what did this animal do wrong? Then play the next.
What it teaches: the flaw becomes something in the body before it is a word. A child who has stomped as the boar understands anger differently from one who has been told about it.
If it stalls: move yourself. Children copy the adult in the room long before they copy each other.
You need: one song, and a hand on the volume
Play a song through once so the room knows it. Play it a second time and turn the sound down at the last line of each verse, letting the children finish it. Turn it back up for the next verse. By the third verse most of the room is waiting for the gap.
What it teaches: rhyme and rhythm, and the confidence of finishing something out loud in a group.
If it stalls: sing the missing line yourself the first time, then hand it back. One demonstration is usually enough.
You need: the Games page on a shared screen, and the sound up
Open Whose Song Is This? on the board or a tablet held up. Play the eight seconds. Instead of tapping, the children point or call the animal's name; the grown-up taps the answer. With two teams, alternate who answers and let the other team judge.
What it teaches: listening, and the animal names — twenty-six new nouns without a single flashcard.
If it stalls: play the clip twice before asking. Listening twice is not cheating; it is the whole exercise.
You need: twenty-six paper letters, one per child, and the list of animals
Give each child a letter to hold. Call the animals in order — boar, swan, sheep, fox — and the child holding that letter steps forward, says the letter out loud, and steps back. Second round: call the flaw instead of the animal. Third round: call neither, and let them line up in order on their own.
What it teaches: letter recognition tied to a picture and a story, and turn-taking with a clear cue.
If it stalls: run the first round holding your own letter alongside them, and go slowly enough that the quietest child gets their turn without being prompted twice.
You need: two large sheets on the wall, one marked with a smile and one with a frown
Read a line from a fable aloud — the hyena mocking, the goose scolding, the boar claiming the whole forest — and the children point to the side it belongs on. Then read a line from a moral: be gentle, and they'll want to stay. Ask what makes the difference. Every line used here is in the book, so nothing is invented for the exercise.
What it teaches: that words have owners and consequences, which is the whole point of the twenty-six fables.
If it stalls: start with the most obvious line you can find. Children need one certain answer before they risk an uncertain one.
You need: nothing, or the animal cards if you have them
One child is told an animal quietly, or holds a card to her forehead without looking. The others act it out — no words, no sounds — until she guesses. Then she picks who goes next. Works with any number, and needs no reading at all.
What it teaches: reading a body instead of a face, and waiting for a turn that is coming.
If it stalls: whisper the animal to two children instead of one, so the shy child has a partner in the middle.
You need: the book, or the moral read from the site
Read a fable's moral once. Go round the circle and let each child say what it means in their own words — not repeat it. Nobody is corrected; the next child simply says theirs. After six or seven children the room has usually arrived somewhere better than the original sentence.
What it teaches: that a lesson can be said more than one way, and that their own words count.
If it stalls: give your own version first, deliberately a plain one, so the bar is low.
You need: two songs and a clear floor
Name a flaw before the music starts — boastfulness. While the song plays, everyone moves as a boastful animal would. On the freeze, everyone must hold a boastful pose. Change the flaw, change the song. Grumpy, frightened, greedy, vain: each one moves differently, and children discover that themselves.
What it teaches: vocabulary for feelings, learnt through the body rather than through definitions.
If it stalls: pick flaws with obvious shapes first — boastful, frightened, greedy — and leave the abstract ones like ungratefulness out entirely.
You need: one printed colouring page per child, crayons
Print a page for each child — the same fable, or let them choose. While they colour, play that fable's song quietly in the background. When a child finishes, she holds hers up and says one sentence about what the animal did. The picture does the remembering for her, so even the child who cannot speak in front of the group manages one line.
What it teaches: the story arrives without reading, and a first experience of presenting something they made.
If it stalls: do not wait for everyone to finish. Take the sentences as they come, and let the slow colourers keep going while others speak.
You need: a large sheet with twenty-six squares, and the colouring pages
Draw a grid of twenty-six squares on a big sheet and label them A to Z. Each time the class finishes a fable — sung, coloured, acted — one child's page goes into that letter's square. The alphabet fills up across a term. On the last day the wall is the whole book, in the children's own colours.
What it teaches: the shape of the alphabet as a journey with an end, and a record of work that belongs to the whole room rather than to one child.
If it stalls: let the children choose whose page goes up, by any rule they invent. The choosing turns out to matter more than the picture.
You need: the book, held up with a thumb over the title
Show a fable's first page — just the painting, with the title covered. Ask what this animal is like. Let three or four children answer before you uncover the word. Then read the fable and see whether the room was right.
What it teaches: reading a picture, and the habit of guessing before being told — which is what makes the answer stick.
If it stalls: start with the loudest paintings: the boar mid-charge, the pufferfish fully puffed, the yak in mid-bellow.
You need: a tablet with headphones, one song
Not a group activity — a place to put a child who needs out. One song, headphones, and the wheel of animals to tap through. Three minutes of the boar's song and a look at twenty-six faces is often enough to bring a child back to the room.
What it teaches: self-settling, and that the songs belong to them and not only to the group.
If it stalls: sit with them for the first song. Independence in a three-year-old usually starts with company.
A wrong link, a missing song, a class that wants to sing all twenty-six — anything at all.
For school and library orders, or for review copies, write to the same address and say which you need.
Tap the word that rhymes.
