Phonemic awareness
Tracks sound isolation, blending, segmenting, and manipulation. Every game and quiz contributes — phoneme work isn't a separate silo, it's tagged into the daily journey.
Skill Tree analytics
See what's actually working — across all five pillars.
Mastery across phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension — for every student, in one teacher-friendly view. Not a black-box composite score; the five SoR pillars, with the receipts.
The five pillars
Scarborough's Rope, rendered as a dashboard.
Every activity in Storytime — books, games, quizzes, ORF — is tagged into one or more pillars. The Skill Tree adds them up in real time so a teacher always knows where to push next.
Phonics
Decoding mastery by pattern: short vowels, blends, digraphs, R-controlled, vowel teams, multi-syllable. Each pattern shows class-wide and per-student progress.
Fluency
Accuracy, WCPM, and prosody from every ORF recording, rolled into a single fluency band. Reads the student's growth curve, not just the latest score.
Vocabulary
Word knowledge from explicit teaching, decodable exposure, and comprehension probes. Tier-2 academic vocabulary is tracked separately from content-specific words.
Comprehension
Open-ended and multiple-choice items from every quiz feed comprehension scoring, with subskill tags for main idea, inference, vocabulary in context, and structure.
Who uses it
Different jobs. Same source of truth.
Teachers grouping for small group
Click any pillar to filter students. Phonics is yellow for three kids and red for one? You just built tomorrow's small-group plan. No spreadsheet, no exporting, no Friday afternoon.
Interventionists tracking IEP goals
Every skill node has its own evidence trail. Pull a student's phonemic awareness history, see the exact items administered and the date each level was achieved. Print or PDF for an IEP meeting in under a minute.
Coaches and admins watching trends
Classroom view shows mastery distributions. Coaches can spot a pattern across grade levels — a fluency dip in 2nd grade winter is visible without asking a teacher to pull a report.
What's in the box
The Skill Tree, end to end.
- Five SoR pillars with mastery levels — Beginning, Growing, Strong, Mastered
- Per-student view + classroom distribution view in one click
- Subskill drill-down — every pillar opens into specific skills with evidence
- Curriculum progression view alongside the SoR view — same data, two lenses
- Mastery labels in plain English — no jargon, no Lexile decoder ring required
- Evidence-of-mastery trail per skill — items, dates, audio replays where applicable
- Updates after every activity — not nightly, not on a refresh, in real time
Frequently asked
Questions teachers and coaches ask.
What is the Skill Tree?
The Skill Tree is Storytime's literacy analytics view. It shows where each student is across the five pillars of the Science of Reading — phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension — and lets teachers drill from a class overview down to the evidence behind any single skill. It replaces the typical 'one composite score' analytics screen with a teacher-facing map of what's actually getting better and what's still stuck.
Which Science of Reading framework does the Skill Tree use?
Scarborough's Rope and the Simple View of Reading. The five pillars (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension) are National Reading Panel canon and align with what districts already expect from SoR-aligned reporting. Inside each pillar, subskills are organized to match the scope and sequence of the curriculum the classroom is using — UFLI, Amplify, IMSE, Wilson, LMW, or Storytime's own.
How is mastery determined?
Each skill collects evidence from multiple item types — quiz questions, ORF recordings, game performance, decodable book completions — weighted by reliability. A student moves into 'Growing' on accumulating consistent partial credit, 'Strong' when accuracy crosses a high threshold across enough items, and 'Mastered' after sustained performance on more challenging probes. The thresholds match standard mastery-learning conventions; teachers can see the raw evidence behind any classification.
Can teachers see the underlying data?
Yes. Every skill node opens a detail panel showing every item that contributed to the score, the date, and the raw result. For ORF, the audio is replayable inline. For quizzes, the questions and student responses are visible. Teachers can flag any item as 'don't count' (e.g., a fire drill interrupted) and the mastery level recalculates.
Is there a separate view for curriculum progression?
Yes. The Skill Tree has two view modes: SoR Pillars (the five-column mastery view) and Curriculum Progression (a vertical lesson timeline). Same underlying data; the curriculum view is sorted by the scope and sequence of the specific program the classroom is teaching — which makes Friday's whole-class lesson plan obvious.
Does the Skill Tree feed into placement?
Yes. Skill Tree mastery levels drive Storytime's automated placement — when a student is 'Strong' on a phonics pattern, the journey moves forward; when they drop to 'Growing,' the system surfaces practice activities. Teachers can override placement at any time. The Skill Tree is both a reporting surface and the source of truth the system uses to plan tomorrow.
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
See your classroom across all five pillars.
Free classroom, no credit card. Roster your students, run one activity, and the Skill Tree starts filling in the same period.