A question for History teachers

[NavyGold]

I'm an experienced teacher (10 years) but changed subjects from ICT to Humanities 2 years ago. I absolutely love it, I did a combined degree that was half tech and half social sciences so it's been nice to utilise the other half of my degree, however I'm struggling with one aspect of teaching History content: Dates

How on earth do you remember them all? I'm generally not good at recalling anything numerical (which is partly why I switched from ICT, I couldn't bare the thought of teaching programming). I don't want to have to keep consulting text books or Google when kids ask what year a particular event occurred. Era's are not a problem. I can recall "1940s" or "The Victorian Era" but specific dates just seem to vanish from my memory.

Does anybody have an tried and tested methods for this?

Repetition and self testing. Flash cards with event on one side and date on the back that you use to test yourself are handy. I often have to check dates though, I teach a range of topics y7-13 and the specs are new so I end up having to check things a lot now.