Choose your own adventure

Writing stories is a difficult activity, mainly because there is so much for children to remember. They must maintain a consistent narration in the first or third person, describe their settings and evoke an atmosphere, and explain what their characters are like and how they react to events. They must also remember to use punctuation correctly, choose interesting vocabulary, and organise their narrative in paragraphs. As well as all this, they have to create an original and imaginative story – a task most adults would fi nd challenging.

When I decided to base a week’s literacy work on the ‘choose your own adventure’ books, I didn’t realise that this approach would provide my class with a supportive framework in which to develop their own ideas, and the opportunity to concentrate on just one objective at a time. The result was a week of great fun and a wonderful set of stories.

The ‘choose your own adventure’ books start with a traditional opening, but the reader can then decide what happens next from a list of options, turning to the appropriate page to read on. I decided to give my class a selection of different settings and characters, and then a list of problems to choose from. Finally, they would be able to choose an ending. I knew from my previous assessments that most of them needed to work on their use of paragraphs, so this was our main objective for the week.