Choose Your Own Adventure Prewriting Lesson 1: Set up the plot

What a way to get kids to work and enjoy themselves at the same time! Students liken this project to writing fanfiction. So many of them are so excited after our first day that they tell me "I can't wait for tomorrow!" In my version, students create Choose Your Own Adventure PowerPoints (Google districts can use Slides, of course) for A Midsummer Night's Dream. This is, to me, a great project for a Shakespeare play. What makes this different than the typical Choose Your Own Adventure is that my students are working from a text they have read, thus making this both creative writing as well as reading comprehension and analysis all in one. 

What Choose Your Own Adventure asks students to do:

- review a plot of the play

- write prose paraphrasing the poetic drama

- show an understanding of the plot following one character

- creatively write deviations from the main plot

- determine a potential theme of the play and how the theme changes if a character's actions change

- use Hyperlinks within a presentation to go to non-linear slides

Overview:

Day 1: create cards for accurate timeline
Day 2: create cards for deviations
Day 3: set up slides and hyperlinks
Day 4: draft accurate timeline
Day 5: draft deviations
Day 6: beta testing with revising
Day 7: submission

Day One:

1. I showed students a couple slides of an example. This gives students the big picture. The
example I use is for Theseus because students have to use a main character and Theseus, being a minor character, works well to model without giving or "stealing" the students' ideas. 

2. Students select a main character and write that name at the top of the paper. 

3. Students write a chronological list of all the decisions that character makes through the play. I encourage my students to use scene summaries and the play itself. I also have them sitting next to people who are doing the same character if they choose. That way they discuss and clarify what happened. I did set the students on a 10 minute timer for this portion so they would not lollygag. 

4. Modeling with my list of options by Theseus, I selected three places where I will have a deviation. The requirement for my students were 2 deviations which leads to 3 separate themes with a total of 1000 words if they worked as individuals and 5 deviations which leads to 6 separate themes with a total of 2000 words if they work in partners. Students selected theirs. I encouraged students who want to do more and make things more complex to do so.

5. With my own index cards I modeled creating just the timeline for what actually happened in the play. I leave the deviations blank. I model a couple cards and then showed the kids my completed set of 8. The rest of the class time was for the kids to finish theirs.  

Don't forget to see what I do Day 2 and Day 3. 

Here are how my example cards looked. I use cards because each card will match up with the PowerPoint slide. 

Cards: red numbers are what the card is,
blue is the card it will link to.
Card 1: title card

Cards are notes/outline.
Deviation Cards: for day 1,
students are only marking the
plot points that actually
 happened.  The blank is where 
the deviation will be filled in later.

Plot Point Cards: sometimes you
have so much information you
will need to split it up over several
 PPT slides or there is a setting
change. That is when you use 1 button.

Final slide includes the theme.