What is the best way to encourage learning in preschool-aged children? Does children’s learning vary depending on content–whether it contains real is tic themes of cook sand firefight ersor fantastical themes of monsters and fairies? We investigate this question by examining how realistic and fantastical theme saffect children’s learning of new vocabulary words.To anticipate,our results suggest that stories with fantastical themes,which in cludeent it iesor events that cannot occur in reality,can boost children’s vocabulary learning more effectively than stories with realistic themes.