Following her PGCE year, Alex Blelloch became concerned about the ways in which some of the students she observed struggled to engage with the complexities of texts written by historians. More broadly, she was also concerned about the limited opportunities younger students had to engage with historians’ works. In this article, she sets out the key reasons why she became determined to give her younger students these opportunities and the methods by which she encouraged them to look at texts more deeply. Using examples from her teaching of students aged 11–14, she outlines how she used a simple visual metaphor to help students read and re-read selected texts. She then describes her methods of using metaphor in the classroom to ensure that historians’ texts became accessible to all students and that students began to demonstrate a richer understanding of historians’ arguments...