Ecosystem Overview
Literacy for Kids is a collection of open-source curricula for children ages 8–12. Each curriculum teaches a foundational literacy that helps young learners understand a part of modern life they already interact with every day but rarely have explained to them.
The Nine Curricula
| Curriculum | What it covers | Live site | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🧠 | Decision Literacy | Probability, trade-offs, biases, and structured reasoning | Website |
| 💻 | Computer Literacy | How computers and the internet work; digital citizenship; coding; AI | Website |
| 📰 | Media Literacy | How media and information are constructed; verification; algorithms | Website |
| 💰 | Financial Literacy | Money as a system; budgeting; saving; trade-offs; value creation | Website |
| 🏛️ | Civic Literacy | Communities, government, public services, and civic participation | Website |
| 🧩 | Emotional & Social Literacy | Emotions as signals; reactivity; trust; conflict; social systems | Website |
| ⚖️ | Legal Literacy | Rules, contracts, rights, and how disputes get resolved | Website |
| 🌍 | Environmental Systems Literacy | Earth as a physical system; energy flow; matter cycles; resource limits | Website |
| 🩺 | Health Systems Literacy | The body as a biological system; homeostasis; sleep; immunity; microbiome | Website |
How It Works
Each curriculum is:
- Independent: no prerequisites, no required sequence
- Discussion-based: built around conversation and reflection, not memorization or tests
- Short lessons: 10–20 minutes per session, adaptable to home, classroom, club, or library
- Age-appropriate: written for roughly ages 8–12 (grades 3–6)
- No expertise required from adults: lessons provide the context facilitators need
The Open-Source Model
Every curriculum is free, openly licensed, and hosted on GitHub. There is no login, paywall, or student-data collection. The materials can be:
- Used as-is directly on the web
- Downloaded and adapted for local needs
- Forked and remixed for new contexts (translation, restructuring, extension)
- Contributed back to improve or expand
Code (JavaScript, CSS, configuration): MIT License
Curriculum content (Markdown lessons): CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
See the Open Source page for details.
The Technical Architecture
Each curriculum is a static Docusaurus v3 site, deployed to GitHub Pages. The sites share a common theme package (literacy-site-theme) that provides:
- Consistent visual design and CSS custom properties
- Cross-curriculum navigation components
- Ecosystem link data (single source of truth for all curriculum URLs)
Sites are built with npm run build and deployed via GitHub Actions on every push to main. There are no servers, databases, or user accounts. Everything is static files.
Hub vs. Curriculum Repositories
The hub (literacy_for_kids) is this site. It introduces the project and helps visitors choose a curriculum. It does not contain lesson content.
Each curriculum repo ({name}_literacy_for_kids) contains the full lesson content for one curriculum. The Docusaurus source lives in a /website subdirectory of each curriculum repo.
The shared theme (literacy_site_template) is an npm package consumed by all nine curriculum sites. When a curriculum is added or a URL changes, update src/data/ecosystemLinks.js in that package and all sites pick up the change on their next build.