Story Seeds mostly sends books to schools. Since the end of August we have also been running a thing that is definitely not a book. It is called Daily Adventure. It runs on a Yoto player, and its job is to wake a child up in the morning by telling them a short personalised story about whatever is actually going on for them that day.
Why would a charity that donates children's books spend a summer building a morning-routine app? The practical reason first: Chris works long hours, and by the time we were looking at how to fill the school holiday, building this on the sofa with our six-year-old as chief tester felt like a fair way to spend the weeks. Underneath that is a better reason. What we learned while doing it matches something we have been saying for four years about the books we donate.
Children need the story to be about them, or adjacent to them. When it is, they listen, and they remember it a week later. When it is not, they are polite for about a minute and then wander off to the sandpit. Every reception delivery we do proves this again. We drop off thirty books in a box and the ones that get taken home first are always the ones a child looks at and says out loud, that one is mine.
Daily Adventure is the same idea at a different time of day. The alarm on the Yoto goes off at 7:15 or 7:30 or whenever you have it set. The story mentions the child's name, whether it is raining, what is on the calendar, how many days until their cousin's birthday. We did not sit down to prove anything about literacy. We were trying to fix the morning in our own house, and it turned out to line up cleanly with the work Story Seeds already does.
Daily Adventure is a Story Seeds project, and it is free to use. If you have a Yoto and you want to try it, setup is a couple of minutes. If you run a Somerset primary and a Yoto would be useful alongside a book donation, tell us when you register.
More there: Why I built Daily Adventure (and what I learned about my kid)