Please note: this article pre-dates the current National Curriculum and some content and links may be outdated. For more current and recent articles see Using stories to support history in the EYFS and Time for a story.

In this article we argue that children in the Foundation Stage should be introduced to history as historical interpretation and enquiry as something historians do. We were interested in developing the history curriculum through story in the Foundation Stage by organising in-service training sessions for practitioners in Foundation Stage settings. From our in-service work it soon became very clear that participants were avoiding history teaching in their settings because they thought of history in terms of how they had been taught it in secondary school. They felt that as young children had little understanding of time, history had little of value for them. But they did agree that history is about telling a story.