Light LearningBedtime stories are not marked
No questions, no score, no right answer and nothing to get wrong. A child asked to prove they understood a story at half past seven has been given homework in bed. They are written to be read slowly and out loud: short paragraphs, sentences that end where the voice wants to fall, and a last paragraph quieter than the first, because the job of the last paragraph is sleep.
Where a story carries a true fact, there is exactly one, and it comes after the story rather than during it. A story that ends in a list of facts is a lesson wearing a story's coat, and a child can tell.
Reading passages are marked, and answerable
Every comprehension question can be settled by rereading the passage. A question a child cannot settle by rereading is not testing comprehension, it is testing what they happened to know already, and that is how confident readers get told they are wrong.
Passages are written for the band they sit in. The Year 1 ones are five short sentences. The Year 11 ones carry an argument and the strongest objection to it, and at least one question asks what the writer concedes, which is the exam question senior students most reliably lose marks on.
Where they are set
A child in Kano and a child in Calgary should each find their own weather, food, money and names in the reading, and should also read about somewhere else. Passages are set in Nigeria, Canada, England, Australia, the United States and China, as well as anywhere at all.
Everything is ours to give away
Every story is either written for this app or genuinely public domain. Nothing is a reworded version of somebody's song, and no traditional story belonging to a people is retold here by us. A test enforces the rule rather than a promise to remember it.