The Anachronistic Mom's
Mythology for Kids
I want my kid to know mythology as well as the stories of Paul Bunyan and Thumbelina.  These stories are the meat and potatoes of our culture.  They're cool.  They're neat.  They're really powerful, and and amazing amount of sleazy, tacky pop culture just takes little bits of classic myths and stories and puts it to hip hop music, or sticks it in a little tight t-shirt.

I once asked the entrance coordinator of the local Waldorf school how they dealt with the "boy urges" in a school where kids didn't watch TV and such.  Did they, I wanted to know, just try to have the kids channel fairies or something?

Nope.  "We offer the real stuff," she replied.  I asked what that meant. 

"In Kindergarten, they study the Maccabees", she said.  "And they read Grimm's fairy tales" (which will curl your toes).  OK. That's real enough..

I listened to her, and the following week told my son his first story in which someone was killed.  It was a mistake, actually.  You see, we took him to the local planetarium for a presentation on the constellations, and the man talked about Orion, "the mighty warrior," a lot.  My son came home and was talking about "the mighty warrior," so I figured I'd look up some of the nice stories on the internet and read it to them.

Ha.  Orion was killed!  It kind of fell out of my mouth ... my "mommy editing " machine was apparently broken.  At any rate, he loved it and he's been playing the mighty Orion ever since.

Many -- if not all -- of the myths and stories about such powerful things as the constellations are really bloody.  In this section, I'm putting links to sites that have helped me to teach my son about mythology -- and I'm trying hard to use the "gentle introductory" method, as opposed to the "kill em all, let God sort 'em out" approach.

Constellations
This

Mythology
Check this out. 

N.S. Gill's about.com guide to mythology on the web.

Here's a list of gods and goddesses by culture.

The Perseus Project is a library of resources for people studying the ancient world.

Here's a history booklist for kids.

Bookstores

Multicultureal mythology books suitable for kids
This site has great indian books that are suitable for kids.  Here's one of our favorites: How Ganesh got his Head.