Sneaking the Romans into bedtime: how stories make learning stick

If your child is learning about the Romans, the rainforest or the Great Fire of London at school, bedtime is a surprisingly powerful place to help it stick.

We are wired to remember a good story

In a classic experiment, people who wove a list of words into a little story later recalled around 93% of them, against just 13% for those who simply tried to memorise (Bower & Clark, 1969). Facts carried inside a narrative simply stay with us.

How to do it gently

You do not need to turn bedtime into a lesson. The magic is in the opposite: a proper adventure that happens to be set among the Romans, where the history slips in through the story rather than being recited at them.

Let them be the hero of the topic

A child exploring a Roman fort in their own story remembers far more than a child reading a list of dates. Tell us a topic when you sign up, and we will weave it gently into their tale, with anything not right for their age held firmly back.

We did exactly this in our example story for Robin, age 6, who is learning about the Titanic.