Small thing we added to Daily Adventure this week. Parents can now get an email summary of the story their child just heard. It arrives just after the morning alarm goes off, tagged with the title, the key plot, the new words that came up.
It came from a specific feedback loop. Families kept telling us their children would run downstairs excited to talk about a story nobody else in the kitchen had heard. The children on the Yoto, the parents on their phones. The morning happening in parallel. We wanted the two ends to meet.
What is interesting about this, for a book-donation charity, is that the same problem shows up on the paper side. Schools tell us the children who read the most, at every reading level, are the ones whose parent or carer can ask them about what they just read. Not quiz them or make them read aloud. Just ask. The child summarises, the adult is mildly interested, the story gets a second airing in the child's head. That is a lot of what reading is.
We do not write family-discussion prompts into our book donations. A book is different from an audio story. A parent flipping to the back cover and asking "so what happened?" is an adequate prompt in itself, and children who can read well enough to read to a grown-up usually do.
For Daily Adventure, where the story exists in the child's headphones and the parent never hears it, the email summary is meant to be the equivalent of that back-cover glance. It is optional and quiet. If you want to know what your child just listened to, you will be told.
More there: We've added email notifications