Thinking about the topic I will write for this post, one idea came to my mind: the “choose-your-own-story” books.
The real name of this kind of books are “choose-your-own-adventure” and it was published between 1979 and 1998 by Bantam Books (now is part of Random House publisher house) selling more than 250 million of books in these 19 years.
The first (and the only one) book I had of that type I can read it around 10 times because each time I open it, I was sure that I would find a new story to read depending on what decisions I took in each page.
If you don’t know the kind of books I was speaking, I explain you: those books starts in the first page (as all the books) telling you the first sentences of a story, you have to read it until the book said to you that you have to choose between two options to follow the story: one option goes to one page, and the other option starts in another different one. So, at that moment, you have to choose the next step of the story. And that happens more times in the book, so you can choose the story you are going to read.
I have to confess that I really like those stories because you have to create the story without creating the characters or the environments, because the book gives it to you.
Those books are a good way to mix two different “worlds”: the literature and the “architecture”, because you have to create your own story based on something that someone has written, so it can be lots of stories inside one single book, so that’s amazing!
I will also recommend it to those children that, as me, didn’t like to read, because it seems as a normal book but it makes you think in order to decide which path will take the main character or to which place you want to go and why. The books are focused to readers between 12 and 16 years, but there are also specific books for children below 10.
To end up the post, I give you here a link to the Wikipedia article about those books where you can find the different books of that collection:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Choose_Your_Own_Adventure_books
Hi Jaime!
Thanks for your exciting post! Maybe for some people the “exciting” adjective is too strong, but the truth is that I did not know about the existence of this kind of books until you mentioned them, and I found your post really really interesting! I was so excited when I read it that I started to talk to people about them. Sadly most of the people from my immediate surroundings, as it happened to me, did not know anything about them except for one friend. He told me that he had the great chance to read one of them when he was a child, and that he loved it as it happened to you. Although I have not had the opportunity to read one of them in English yet, he lent me his book named “El caso Brackenstall” which belongs to the “Multi-aventura” series of books of Ingelek Juvenil publisher house, and I think it was awesome.
By the way, a few weeks ago I wrote one post about one activity that I carried out during my last practicum (Quixote post), which share with the reading of the books that you presented, what I considered an important feature: the capability of actively involving pupils in the stories they read -chance to be authors-, as well as motivating them; Both essential things to make them feel engage with literary tasks.
So… millions of thanks for letting us know another cool way that will help us to encourage our future pupils to try a fantastic experience: the reading of books!
After five weeks of post it seems that there was anything new to talk about. Your post is really surprising Jaime. I have never heard about it. Anyway, I like a lot the idea because it looks great to encourage creativity and motivate our students to start reading and writing.
Furthermore I am completely in agreement with you about the advantage of use this type of text to help people that hate the creation of character, environments…
Finally I will like to mention that there is one similar resource on some web pages. As we are in the new technologies era, here I let you one example of this kind of pages:
http://www.rif.org/kids/readingplanet/club/coya_video.htm
I hope your next post