A warm, levelled library of values-driven African stories. Every book a child finishes plants a virtue — Honesty, Courage, Kindness — in their own Character Garden, and the type size quietly adapts to how they read.
Stories is a reading app with a quiet second purpose: character. Each illustrated story carries a primary virtue — named in English and a local language, like Honesty · Nokwaredi — woven through the plot rather than preached. There are no comprehension quizzes and no scores; the rewards are the stories themselves and the garden they grow.
Open it from the Student Portal or at stories.simusim.com. It greets the reader by name: “Akwaaba, Kofi.”
The home screen is a set of horizontally scrolling shelves:
Above the shelves sits the Character Garden card — “X virtues grown”, or “Plant your first virtue” for a new reader — which opens the garden (§ 05).
Turning the last page brings the story's quiet ceremony:
The garden is the child's reading history as a living thing: one plant per virtue, and the more stories grown that virtue, the more blossoms on the plant (“Grown by 3 stories”). Tap a plant's chevron to see exactly which stories planted it — each links straight back to the reader.
A new reader sees the empty-garden invitation instead: “The virtues you grow will bloom here. Start reading to grow your first virtue.”
The Parent Portal's Stories section shows stories finished, the latest title with its virtue, and a garden summary (“Garden: Honesty ×2 · Courage ×1…”) — enough to ask the only question that matters at dinner: “what happened in the story?”
Install the app and use the offline download option while connected — stories (text and art) store on the device and read fine without data. Reading progress and reflections sync when the connection returns. See the general offline guide.
Email us and a real person on the Simusim team will get back to you. School staff can also reach us through their school's usual support channel.