Decodable books
Phonics-controlled stories tagged to your scope and sequence. Storytime adds books in the right pattern order; you can hand-pick or let the system fill.
Journey Builder
Differentiate without burning out.
Drag-and-drop a student's literacy journey from books, quizzes, ORF challenges, and creative activities — or let Storytime build it from your curriculum. Either way, every kid gets the right next thing.
What goes in a journey
Six activity types. One unified flow.
A journey isn't just a list of books. It's a sequence of practice, assessment, and creative work — each item tagged to the lesson and the SoR pillar it lifts.
Comprehension quizzes
Multiple-choice and open-ended items, auto-generated from each book or hand-written. Quizzes inherit the lesson context — vocabulary, target patterns, comprehension goals.
ORF challenges
Oral reading fluency probes scored on accuracy, WCPM, and prosody — used as both formative practice and placement gates inside the journey.
Creative activities
Have students write a decodable, record a music video, or compose a song based on the lesson — generative work that locks the phonics learning into memory.
Practice games
10+ K-2 game types tied to specific phonics patterns. Pull a game into a journey to give a struggling skill a targeted practice round.
Heart word reviews
Targeted high-frequency word practice cued from the journey's lesson — heart-word teaching procedure built in.
Three ways to build
Auto-generate. Hand-build. Override per kid.
Auto-generated from your curriculum
Pick a curriculum (UFLI, Amplify, IMSE, Wilson, LMW, or Storytime AI) and a lesson. Storytime builds the journey: books, quizzes, fluency probes, and practice in the right order. You can edit any step.
Hand-built, drag-and-drop
Add items in any order. Reorder by dragging. Delete what doesn't fit. The flat item list keeps the cognitive load on what's happening tomorrow, not on a folder hierarchy you need to maintain.
Differentiated per student
One journey per student per curriculum. Place advanced readers ahead, hold strugglers back for re-teach, or fork an individual path entirely — without breaking the class flow.
What's in the box
The builder, end to end.
- Flat drag-and-drop item list — no nested folders, no menus to fight
- Save-on-confirm — edits are local until you commit, so 'oops' is recoverable
- Auto-generation from any of the supported curricula
- Per-student override on any item without breaking the class baseline
- Quiz auto-link — each quiz attaches to the nearest preceding book
- Built-in placement gates — students don't advance past a lesson without passing
- Recovery actions — reset an item, release to next lesson, repeat current lesson
- Teacher-review queue when an OE quiz response needs human judgment
Frequently asked
Questions teachers and coaches ask.
What is the Journey Builder?
The Journey Builder is the Storytime tool teachers use to assemble a personalized literacy path for each student. It takes books, comprehension quizzes, ORF challenges, creative writing activities, practice games, and heart-word work, and lets the teacher arrange them — either by dragging items by hand into a flat list, or by letting Storytime auto-generate the sequence from the classroom's curriculum.
Is the Journey Builder for one student, the whole class, or both?
Both. Teachers can define a class-level journey — the baseline path everyone follows — and then override individual students without disrupting the class baseline. A student who's ahead gets pushed forward; a struggling reader gets pulled back into re-teach. The override system is non-destructive: the class journey is the source of truth, and overrides are layered on top.
How does auto-generation work?
Pick a curriculum and a starting lesson. The auto-generator pulls the decodable books matched to that lesson's phonics scope, adds a comprehension quiz for each book, inserts an ORF challenge at the right interval, and sprinkles in practice games for any patterns the curriculum flags as needing extra repetition. The output is a complete journey of typically 20–60 items, ready to assign in one click. Teachers can edit any step before assigning.
What happens when a student gets stuck on a journey item?
Storytime tracks progress per item. If a student fails a quiz or scores below the placement threshold on an ORF probe, the system flags it for teacher review and surfaces recovery actions: reset the item to try again, release the student to the next lesson, or repeat the current lesson with new content. Teachers can also assign a 'practice mission' that surfaces in the student's view as the top-priority activity.
Can I see what's in a journey before I assign it?
Yes. The Builder shows the full item list — every book, quiz, fluency probe, and game — in order, with the lesson context and estimated student time per step. Open any item to preview the actual content. Save the journey as a template to re-use across students or classes.
Does the journey adapt automatically as students progress?
Yes — placement gates and the Skill Tree drive automated adjustments. When a student demonstrates mastery on a lesson, the journey advances. When a student misses thresholds, the journey holds and inserts practice. Teachers see every automated adjustment and can override it. The system does not move a student silently — every advancement or hold is visible in the journey timeline.
About the authors
Written and edited by the Storytime AI founding team.
Brian Carlson
Co-founder & CEO
Co-founder and CEO of Storytime AI. Leads the company from Baltimore, building a literacy platform that meets every reader where they are — anchored to the Science of Reading.
LinkedIn
Scott Quinlan
Co-founder & CTO
Co-founder and CTO of Storytime AI. Owns engineering, product infrastructure, and the agentic growth pipeline — from the platform's AI generation engine to the structured-literacy content surface district leaders evaluate.
LinkedIn
Kate Dwyer
Co-founder & CMO
Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Storytime AI. Translates Science-of-Reading research and product capability into language teachers, parents, and district leaders can act on. Based in the Washington DC–Baltimore area.
LinkedIn
Build your first journey before lunch.
Free classroom, no credit card. Pick a curriculum, pick a lesson, hit auto-generate. You'll have a journey to assign before the next bell.