Linda Aukett

One of the first things you, as the teacher, need to decide is what to write. Some ideas are:

Poetry - with links to profiles of different characters appearing in the poems

'Split-ending' stories with good and bad endings

Pick-a-path stories

Stories or poems that have two or more 'tones' or characters interacting

We've written about how we managed hypertext writing below and separated it into age groups as each was managed slightly differently.

Y3/4

Year 3/4 children are often not yet fluent, confident writers.
Before beginning this task we needed to do lots of talking. How a story works - beginning, middle, end; problem and resolution; characters and story flow. From here children worked in small groups on concept mapping and event/consequence mapping to get the ideas flowing.
Once they had an idea for a story they got writing. Each child had input into the characters and the beginning, setting the scene, then they individually took path and wrote their own 'bit'.
At the end, they collated all the paths, decided on how best to connect them and published their story, using frontpage express, on the classroom computer.
Our time frame was 1 week for our first efforts. This was so the children had a quick experience to get it published. We wanted them to get the overall taste of success before introducing content challenges.
This is where our school intranet was a perfect publishing forum.

Jesse the Diplodocus

Y5/6

Children at this level are more fluent writers so we wanted the children to experience writing for an identified audience. They would be writing pick-a-path type stories to be published on the school intranet for the school family to read and then onto the internet for everyone.
We began by investigating pick-a-path books. These included chapter books and picture books. We also introduced them to published stories on the Thorndon School website as well as The Neverending Story website.
We modelled and played with ideas for a week. Then each group constructed their own story. As a group they chose the initial setting and characters and identified paths they could take. Each child in the group took responsibility for one or more paths. Three times a week for 45 minutes the groups met to work on their story. This took 3-4 weeks for most groups to complete.
Publishing was done in the computer lab - two groups at a time with 2 people typing and 2 reading for each group. They took turns typing and reading. They used FrontPage Express to publish the stories.

Vegy Castle

Space Gate

Y7/8

These children had already had experience writing for an identified audience in a specific genre. We used mystery, disaster and dual ended stories.
They investigated these types of stories and then wrote their own. They published these in hardcopy to be read in the class, then translated them into the hypertext format for the school intranet and website.
We used the lab computers to publish in FrontPage Express. These were mainly individual rather than group stories.

Where is James?

Cry Hiroshima

Mr Linden's Library

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