Built with teachers, for teachers

Structured literacy, carried through to the writing.

Most structured literacy tools stop at reading. We're building StoryMate to carry it through to written expression, and we're piloting it now with a small group of New Zealand primary schools.

Join the pilotTry the editor

Ready today

What pilot classes use now

Everything in this section works in StoryMate today.

Reading lessons from your own texts

Upload a PDF, paste a link, or paste the text. StoryMate drafts a three-lesson unit you can edit, present, or download as PowerPoint. Each lesson has:

  • An introduction and a preview of the day's reading
  • Four vocabulary words from the text, each with its definition and the sentence it appears in
  • Partner discussion questions about the reading

Writing Guides

Narrate, Recount and Persuade, each laid out box by box from opening to ending, so students always know what comes next.

  • Narrative and recount guides include a greyed worked example students write over
  • A word bank of time and feeling words alongside
  • Available in visual-novel projects

Help getting started

  • Sentence starters one keystroke away: story openers, describing, and sharing ideas
  • Writing streaks that count the days students write, not how many words
  • Students publish real interactive stories their classmates can play

A class dashboard

  • Add students by email address or share a join link
  • Assign a writing lesson in a couple of clicks
  • See who's started and how far through each student is
  • Read each student's work right where they wrote it

During the pilot, we set up your classes with you.

Building with pilot schools

Next: Read, Write, Assess as one loop

These are what we're working on now. We'd rather build them with you than guess.

Lesson to writing task

Each reading lesson turns into a matching writing task.

Classes in one step

Teachers create classes and share a class code themselves.

Feedback that goes back

Teacher comments and marks that students see.

Guides everywhere

Writing Guides in interactive fiction projects too.

Grounded in evidence

We're not the whole science of reading. We're working on the writing end of it, and each tool follows a well-evidenced practice:

Writing in manageable steps

Guides and sentence starters break writing into one sentence and one part at a time: the principle behind The Writing Revolution.

Hochman & Wexler, 2017

Explicit vocabulary teaching

New words are picked from the class text and taught explicitly, shown in the sentence where students will meet them.

Beck, McKeown & Kucan, Bringing Words to Life

Writing about reading

Writing about what they read improves students' comprehension of it. It's why we're joining reading lessons to writing tasks next.

Graham & Hebert, Writing to Read, 2010

The pilot

Pilot StoryMate with your class

What you get

  • Everything in “Ready today”, set up with you
  • Early access to new features as they land
  • A direct line to the people building it

What we ask

  • Use it with your class
  • Tell us honestly what works and what doesn't
Get in touch

Why we're building it

Kia ora, I'm Dan. I'm training as a teacher, and I build StoryMate alongside my placements. Every feature has to survive a real class: if it doesn't save a teacher time or get a reluctant writer writing, it goes.

Our goal is simple: help young readers become fluent, confident writers, and give their teachers time back.

Dan Milward · teacher in training