When I taught 5th grade, my students were especially interested in Choose Your Own Adventure books. They would read them during IDR time in Reading Workshop, so I decided to add a writing unit that focused on this genre.

Many of the lessons I taught were similar to those I would teach during any fiction unit of study, but extra emphasis was placed on figurative language, creating suspense, and organizing their interactive adventure. The stories were finally published as PowerPoint books so that readers could link to different pages as they made their decisions. (In PowerPoint, students can easily insert buttons that link to different pages in the slide show.) You could do the same project using hyperlinks in Microsoft Word or any Web page design program.

Download the Choose Your Own Adventure template my students used when writing their stories. (Students will need many copies of the second page since they will really be writing several stories in one.)

When I taught 5th grade, I was unfortunately required to give grades in writing, so I also have a Choose Your Own Adventure grading rubric for this project.