As a child that was drawn to books and to the library more than anywhere else, I LOVED the Choose Your Own Adventure series books! They bring back so many memories. So many times after I had finished a book, I tried to flip through the pages and figure out just how the author(s) had figured out a method for knowing which page to flip to next and how many real endings there were. Of course, since my 10-year-old brain had more to explore, I didn’t think about it too long. HA!
But – recently as I was surfing the ‘net looking for some fun new resources for you – I stumbled across Inklewriter – and it brought back all those memories of really picking my own story based on the choices I made in the book. This website will allow your own students to make their very own version of Choose Your Adventure! So cool!
It walks students through how to set up the story – and how the system works.
The arrows really make it visually easy to add more to a certain spot, end it, or create different choices where the story splits.
Formatting is fun – you can do some basic items such as bold and italics. Easily create new chapters (sections). Play around with some more advanced conditional logic options to really get the story moving in different ways, Even add your own images into the writing (the only caveat to this is that the image must be hosted on the internet somewhere already as you need a URL. If your students have their own images drawn out, simply scan them and upload to a free service like Photobucket or flickr to have a URL for the photo.
Here is an example of a story from their website. You are only given this much of the story, and then have to choose from one of the 2 options at the bottom to continue.
Definitely a fun site to visit and share with your students! Differentiation would certainly not be an issue as everything from basic to more advanced stories could be created by students at whatever level was appropriate. Students can even save their work by creating an account – and Inklewriter even has an option for creating email addresses if students don’t have their own emails, which is super handy.
Go check it out and let me know what you think. While this is probably more suited for students in grades 3 and up, I could see even a Kinder teacher use this as a group project to start talking about story elements.
How do you think you could use this website with your students? I would love to hear in the comments below!
Happy writing,
~Charity
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You have the best ideas and information to share. Thank you so so much!
Awww – you are super sweet Rande! Thanks so much and happy it was useful. 🙂
Love this idea. What a great way to motivate. Seems perfect for next week in the classroom (the week before winter break)!
My son always loved those books, too. This is a great idea. As a SLP I can see this being loads of fun in therapy, too, for motivating reluctant writers.