Children enjoy creating their own storyline in early reading books, as Veronica Carter discovered using PowerPoint
Children's early reading books are a lot more interesting and fun now than when I learned to read. With a branching storybook, they can be taken one step further by letting the child decide some aspects of how the story unfolds.
When I used PowerPoint recently to make a branching storybook for my reception class, they loved creating their own stories and being the decision makers. It also provided an opportunity for cutting, gluing, sequencing and, oh yes, reading!
Normally with PowerPoint, a click anywhere on a slide moves you on to the next slide. If you turn this facility off you can create buttons that take you on to a chosen slide.
To turn off the automatic slide transition, go to Slide Show (Slide transition, and then make sure that both boxes for Advancing are unchecked).
To make a given piece of clipart into a button, 'right click' on it, click on Action Settings, then click on 'Hyperlink to' and select the slide that you want to go to if the child clicks on this picture.
I used a CD-Rom of clip-art from Oxford Reading Tree that has a simple storyline about Floppy the dog wanting to go to the park. The children could choose between four familiar characters to go to the park with Floppy. Clicking on the picture of your chosen character takes you on to a slide showing that character, with Floppy, in the park. The child then gets to choose between four unlikely characters that they meet in the park - a pirate, dinosaur, monster or king. (This could liven up suburban living!) Once again, clicking on your chosen character takes you on to a next slide showing all three of them back home in the garden, with Mum uttering those immortal words, 'Oh no!' These two choices of four mean that there are a total of 16 ways the story can unfold, ideally giving each child the feeling of having created their own individual story.
The stories can be used simply on the computer with a 'Start Again' button taking the child back to the first slide, or alternatively, the four slides which constitute the child's story can be printed out, using the Handout printing option to give four little pictures of their pages.
If you do this the child can then cut out these pictures, sequence them and glue them in to make their very own reading book to take home.
My class thoroughly enjoyed this activity, regardless of their reading ability, and I was amused to discover that the children were much quicker than I was at identifying which slides needed printing out to give their storyline when looking at all the slides in the Slide Sorter View.
You can contact Veronica at Veronica@vcarter.freeserve.co.ukif you would like more advice on making a branching storybook.
