History · Grades 5–6 and 7–8
Walk in their shoes
Stand where someone long ago stood, with what they knew.
Your child spends one day as a child in another time and place, told as a story. They make three choices, see what each led to, and see the real letter or diary the story was built from.
- Grades 5–6 and 7–8
- 20 min
- Nothing to prepare
- On the screen
Free to sign up.
Is it a good fit?
- Ready if Your child can read a few lines of a story and give a reason for a choice.
- Too much today? Start with Detective of the past: reading one source closely before living a whole day.
- Too easy? The Grade 7–8 level: a harder day with not enough to go round and a rule that seems unfair, then what they knew that we do not.
What your child practises
- Choices and what came of them
- The real source behind a story
- What they knew and what we know
“They didn't know what we know now, so that choice made sense to them.”
If your child says something like this, in their own words, the idea has landed. Finishing the rounds means they took part; this is the learning.
Your part
- Nothing to prepare or print
- Each question has a Read it to me button
- Plays alone, with you to talk to afterwards: every day is built from real sources named on the screen, and no story puts your child in the place of someone enslaved, persecuted or caught in a war
Take it off the screen (optional)
Look up the sources named on the screen together, like Mary Anning's letters.
More like this
The full design
What it is
One day as a child in another time and place, told as a story with choices. Your child decides what to do at three points in the day, sees what it led to, and sees the real thing that part was built from: a diary, a letter, a photograph. The Pet is beside them asking "what would you do, and why?" The point is to stand where someone else stood, with what they knew, not to judge them.
How it goes
A picture of the place and a few lines of story. A choice, then why: three reasons to pick from, any of them fair. Then what came of it, and a small card that says where that part came from: "From a letter Mary Anning wrote in 1833." After three choices the day ends, and your child says what they think now, typed, or told to you. If your child is stuck, the simpler way keeps the choice and lets the reason wait.
The Pet
It asks: "why that one?", and the card under what came of it asks, naming the oldest grown-up in your family's tree, "what would Grandpa have done?" It notices: "you waited for the cliff. That was careful." It remembers, later the same day: "earlier today you chose to go straight down after the storm. What about now?" It says plainly what nobody can check any more. It never says a choice was wrong, and never says the people in the story were.
By band
5–6: a gentle day, three choices: the Lyme Regis beach where Mary Anning's family dug fossils out of the cliffs, about 1812, or setting out with Marco Polo from Venice to the Great Khan in 1271; each choice shows what came of it and the real source behind it. 7–8: a harder day, with not enough to go round, a rule that seems unfair and a choice with no good option: a farm hamlet in Oxfordshire in the 1880s, where school costs pennies a week and the harvest needs every child, or Marco Polo's desert and mountains; and afterwards, "what did they know that you do not, and what do you know that they did not?" No story at either age puts your child in the place of someone enslaved, persecuted, driven from home or caught in a war or an atrocity; a hard day is a thin harvest or a rule about who may go to school. Days set where your family lives or comes from are not written yet.
What it grows
Children learn history best when they have to decide something inside it. A widely studied role-play game with choices and consequences gave older children measurable gains in what they knew, how they read a document, and how well they could see a time from the inside. This game borrows that shape, at a smaller scale.
Done, and what counts as evidence
Done means one day lived through. What your child said at the end is worth keeping as an observation; the choices themselves are never scored or counted.
What's personal
Every day is written for the app from real sources, named on the screen beside the part they tell, so you can look them up together; every person named lived long ago and is in those sources, and nobody is made up. None of it is a school curriculum. Days set where your family lives or comes from are the next to write. What your child chose and wrote stays in your family's account.