Answers.com has some interesting background on Kipling's Just So Stories:

"Many of the stories are addressed to "Best Beloved" (they were first written for Kipling's eldest daughter, Josephine, who had died during an outbreak of influenza in 1899), and throughout they use a comically elevated style inspired by the formal speech of India, full of long and improbable-sounding words, some of them made up. As a result, it is a delight to read them aloud, and easy to memorise passages from them. They were a highly popular item on the BBC's radio programme Children's Hour in the 1950s."

We love the Just So Stories, and recorded the Elephant's Child at the start of the year, but we are worried that they are difficult for modern children to follow. We are giving some serious thought to doing a few stories from the Jungle Books, including the wonderful Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.
which we think is easier (it's the tale of a plucky mongoose and was my favourite story as a boy). Now that I'm a little older, I'm a big fan of lugubrious and extremely funny story of a crocodile from The Second Jungle Book, The Undertakers.

Although I'm a big fan of Kipling, I do have one reservation about the Just So Stories. I'm by no means Politically Correct, but I find the frequent references to spanking a bit yuck. The Jungle Books are much more to my taste. Dark and rich, and pulling no punches about life and death, they deserve to be read by grown-ups as much as by children.