Choose+Your+Own+Adventure

    This lesson plan has been adapted from [|ReadWriteThink.org].

 Choose Your Own Adventure: An Internet Writing Experience (designed for 8th Grade English/Language Arts)


After completing literature circles on the adventure book unit, students will plan their own adventure story. They will be divided into smaller groups for each split in the story until finally the students are writing their own endings. Groups will create their own Wiki pages with the parts of the story hyperlinked to each other.


This lesson combines reading and writing in a collaborative, small-group learning experience. It utilizes technology, specifically Wiki page design, group and individual work, and student self-assessment. As Wilhem and Friedemann (1998) state, "[D]esigning hypermedia projects encourages students to name themselves as readers, writers, and learners and supports them in the achievement of better reading, idea development, sense of audience, classifying, organizing, collaborating, representing understandings, revising, and articulating and applying critical standards about the quality of their work" (15). From cooperative learning to self-reflection, this lesson reinforces the literacies that students need for success in and out of school. This lesson also gives students an opportunity to express themselves creatively through unconventional storytelling, while taking control of their own learning and execution during the process.

Wilhem, Jeffrey D., and Paul D. Friedemann, with Julie Erickson. 1998. //Hyperlearning: Where Projects, Inquiry, and Technology Meet.// York, ME: Stenhouse.

Further Reading
Dale, Helen. 1997. //Co-authoring in the Classroom: Creating an Environment for Effective Collaboration.// Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Daniels, Harvey, and Marilyn Bizar. 1998. //Methods That Matter: Six Structures for Best Practices Classrooms.// York, ME: Stenhouse.

Gruber, Sibylle, ed. 2000. //Weaving a Virtual Web: Practical Approaches to New Information Technologies.// Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Marlow, Bruce A., and Marilyn L. Page. 1998. //Creating and Sustaining the Constructivist Classroom.// Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Zemelman, Steven, Harvey Daniels, and Arthur Hyde. 1998. //Best Practice: New Standards for Teaching and Learning in America's Schools.// 2e. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.


Students will understand and be able to execute the structure of Choose Your Own Adventure stories. They will become familiar with the elements of fiction: setting, character, plot structure, conflict, and point of view in the context of adventure novels. Students will work in small groups, collaborating on writing their own adventure stories, and focus later on individual endings. Students will be able to use //Treasure Island, The Count of Monte Cristo,// and //Huckleberry Finn// which will have comprised the adventure unit previously studied as reference points.


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<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: left"> Instructions and Activities
<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: left"> 1. Begin by going over with students the elements of fiction: setting, character development, plot structure, conflict, and point of view, and talking about how they were found in the novels read in literature circles. 2. Show students an example of a Choose Your Own Adventure book or one of the Choose Your Own Adventure stories online; Dunnbar Bound is a good example. 3. With the whole class explore the elements of the Choose Your Own Adventure story, including the unique second-person point of view which makes the reader the main character in the story. Practice some whole-group exercises coming up with options and alternate endings to prompts. Then go over your desired procedure for writing the stories with the class. 4. Introduce the beginning of the Choose Your Own Adventure story to the class. 5. Divide students into small groups of two or three and have them brainstorm ideas for completing the story. Each group must come up with at least two threads of the stories. 6. Each student will then write four individual endings, resulting in eight possible adventures per group. Students also have the option of collaborating on an ending that will bring two branches of the story to the same result. 7. Students will peer edit and revise their stories for content, punctuation, and strong story elements. 8. When groups have finished writing their stories, we will go over how to connect and link Wikipages from the beginning of the story which the teacher will have already published on the site. Each group will create their own pages and links for each branch of the story. 9. When the stories are published online, each group will present and read their story to the class.

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<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: left"> Dunnbar Bound http://friend.ly.net/users/jorban/adventure/page01.html Interactive Choose Your Own Adventure story for and about children. A good example to share with the class.

The Redwall Series http://www.angelfire.com/wy/lemmingpie/redwallcyoa.html Choose Your Own Adventure stories based on the Redwall series. An added advantage to this site is that students can look at submissions from writers who write a Redwall-based adventure. Could be a real challenge to students.

Sample Choose Your Own Adventure Stories http://www.mpsomaha.org/willow/p5/projects/stories2004.html This page features numerous create-your-own-adventure stories created by fifth graders at Willowdale Elementary School in Nebraska.

Lesson Author's Class Web Site http://ps044.k12.sd.us/subweb/cybercomp_10 Patricia Schulze's cyber composition class. Student examples are linked from the Student Pages page.

CyberEnglish Page http://www.tnellen.net/cyberenglish/webfolio.html Ted Nellen's original CyberEnglish site. Student-created Web pages can be found here.

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<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: left"> Part of this lesson should be evaluated by the students. Each student will turn in, with their story, a short reflection tracing the steps they took in the process, what they had problems with, how they worked out their problems, and how they feel about their final project. Identification of literary story elements should also be included in this.

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<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: left"> 3 - Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts. They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g., sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics).

5 - Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.

6 - Students apply knowledge of language structure, language conventions (e.g., spelling and punctuation), media techniques, figurative language, and genre to create, critique, and discuss print and nonprint texts.

8 - Students use a variety of technological and information resources (e.g., libraries, databases, computer networks, video) to gather and synthesize information and to create and communicate knowledge.

11 - Students participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.

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<span style="display: block; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-align: left"> I'm Finito.

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