A dedicated literacy advocate and middle school ELA teacher, Jamie Class was seeking a new literacy intervention curriculum for her older striving readers that was engaging, accessible and relevant. The reading intervention programs she was using did not create opportunities for her older striving readers to practice their literacy skills with a connected text that was accessible and interesting to her students. After doing her own research into adolescent literacy curricula, she found Storyshares and couldn’t believe that we had created a literacy intervention program specifically for older students – LIFT, Literacy Intervention for Teens, was exactly what Jamie was looking for.
Upon implementing the program, Jamie quickly realized how engaging the stories were for her students and knew that if her older striving readers had books that were of interest to them, they would become more confident readers: “I can’t say enough nice things about how engaging the materials are.”
Not only did LIFT include engaging and accessible texts for her older students, but it provided alignment to grade-level standards. She shares,
“What excited me the most was the fact that the teacher guide has both a grade level standard and a fundamental reading standard.”
Jamie loves the Educator Manual for its clear and thorough lesson plans, structure and guidance. At Storyshares, we strive to provide intervention programming to teachers that is easy to implement and requires no additional preparation – we were thrilled to hear that teaching LIFT has been a joy to Jamie.
Jamie began implementing LIFT in the fall of 2025. She teaches LIFT five days a week to her literacy intervention class and twice a week to students who are focusing on building fluency skills. Jamie couldn’t believe her students’ mid-year iReady assessment results: “Usually two or three of my students go up at the mid-year diagnostic, [and after implementing LIFT], almost all of my students improved on the iReady test.” The students focusing on fluency skills “jumped two, three or four grades on the recent iReady mid-year assessment.” We are thrilled to hear of these results and look forward to seeing how her students continue to improve their literacy skills as the year progresses.
At Storyshares, we hope that our books and curricula spark joy in reading for older students. Since implementing LIFT, Jamie shared that
“The kids come in and ask ‘are we reading today?’”
And that’s exactly what we hope to hear.
If you are curious to learn more about LIFT, please reach out to us at info@storyshares.org. We look forward to connecting!