The Bedtime Scientist

For teachers and librarians

Free to use. Nothing to sign up for.

Sixty science episodes written to be calm rather than loud, grouped below by subject with runtimes, so you can find one that fits the time you actually have. Every episode has a written guide, and sixty of the questions children ask have written answers.

Before you use it

What a classroom needs to know.

  • It costs nothing and needs no account. No login, no free trial, no paywall. Play it from this site or any podcast app.
  • There is no advertising in it. No sponsor reads, no host-read spots, nothing sold to your students.
  • Nothing is collected from a child. The site has no accounts and asks students for nothing. Our privacy policy says exactly what is and is not stored, in plain language.
  • It is built to be sensory-friendly. One steady voice. No music, no sound effects, no sudden volume changes, nothing that startles. The volume ramps in and the last minute fades out.
  • The science is checked. Written to be true first and calm second, in three layers, so a five year old and a ten year old can listen to the same episode and each get something.
  • Episodes run 5 to 17 minutes, most of them around 11. Runtimes are listed beside every title below.

Browse by subject

Sixty episodes, sorted the way you plan.

Space and the sky 10 episodes

Whole-class favourites, and the ones children ask the most questions about afterwards.

Earth, weather and seasons 13 episodes

Useful alongside a weather unit, a rock cycle unit, or the first frost.

Animals and living things 17 episodes

The largest group, and the easiest place to start with a class that has not listened before.

The body and the senses 8 episodes

A ready-made five senses sequence, plus sleep, breathing and inheritance.

Feelings and friendship 2 episodes

Written for social and emotional learning time rather than science time.

How things work 10 episodes

Engineering and physics, told through machines children have actually seen.

Beyond the audio

There is a written version of all of it.

Every episode has a guide with the science set out plainly, questions worth asking together, and a calm-down to finish on. Most also have an expanded Family Guide with two age lanes, a hands-on experiment, the vocabulary, and something printable.

Separately, 60 real questions children ask have written answers, each one linked to the episode that covers it. Several teachers use those as a bell-ringer or a reading passage rather than playing anything at all.

The questions, answered See the Family Guides

Quiet time

For rest time, transitions, and regulation.

A good deal of the mail here comes from families of neurodivergent children, and from the speech and occupational therapists who work with them. The reason is the design rather than the topics: predictable pacing, one unchanging voice, and nothing engineered to grab attention.

That makes it usable in the parts of the day that are not really about content, when a room needs to come down rather than gear up. We make no clinical claims about it. We are simply telling you how it is built, so you can judge whether it suits the children in front of you.

Using it with a class?

I would genuinely like to hear about it, and if there is something that would make this easier to use in a classroom or a library, tell me and I will build it. Write to me here.