Growing Stories

Classic tales, retold by hand, with your child in them.

For four- and five-year-olds. Treasure Island is free, first page to last.

Coming soon to the App Store

Your child in the story.

Add a name and an age. The name goes into the sentences, so a four-year-old meets themselves in Treasure Island. They choose who they look like in the pictures too.

A story page: a child in a boat looking through a spyglass, with the child's own name in the sentence below

Illustrated page by page.

Every picture was drawn for the page it sits on, and redrawn when it wasn't right. One fills the screen at a time, and your child swipes when they are ready.

The giant's wife opening her door, drawn across the whole screen

Made to be put down.

Around twenty pages, short enough that a four-year-old reaches the end. No story is queued behind it and there is no countdown to the next one, so when the story ends, the app ends with it. Nothing rewards a child for coming back tomorrow, and nothing makes them uneasy about stopping today.

No ads and no tracking in the app. Read the privacy policy

The list of readers on an account, with a quiet card suggesting a stretch

Each child reads their own copy.

Every reader on the account picks their own character and keeps their own place in every book, so a younger sibling never loses an older one's page.

A grid of characters a child picks from for their own shelf

Made by one family.

Growing Stories is made by one family in the evenings, once the dishes are done. It started as a way to get one boy to sit still long enough for a story, and what worked was putting his name in it. Every book is picked and rewritten by hand from there, which is why there are four and not four hundred.

Read how it started, and what it costs us to run

The shelf: six illustrated covers, two of them marked coming soon