The kindergarten class in which the stories were written consisted of 24 children, a teacher, and student teacher. Children used traditional print media (paper, pencils, and crayons) as well as the computer as writing tools. There were four computers at the computer center, and the most frequent visits to the center occurred during free play sessions. Although children were permitted to write on any topic they wished, they frequently wrote in response to some aspect of a theme or topic of study.

One theme around which the teachers and children developed a class story was the study of colors and shapes. The theme unit, which was written by the student teacher, incorporated both traditional and electronic forms of writing. The unit was infused with content and literacy processes and provided students with many concrete ways to explore print, color, shapes, and other media.

Among the unit's more traditional print activities were making a booklet of colors and shapes, reading aloud books that illustrate these concepts (such as Look Around! by Leonard Everett Fisher and I Like Colors by Barbara Swayby), singing songs, and labeling colors and shapes in the environment. Activities centered around electronic media included video and software programs that featured a variety of shape and color concepts. While the unit was in progress, three programs were available at the computer center for the children to use during free play: Kid Pix Studio by Brøderbund, Kid Works II by Davidson, and Mathkeys Unlocking Geometry, Volume 1, by The Learning Company. (For web sites that offer reviews of these programs—and many others—please refer to the Web Sites section of this article.) Mathkeys includes four activities: Geogrid, Mirrors, Pattern Blocks, and Shape Blocks. Because the subject of study was colors and shapes, two computers were loaded with the Mathkeys software. Children could create pictures with the pattern and shape blocks, a rubber band in a geogrid, and a split screen that mirrored shapes. All programs had a word-processing function and screen-printing capabilities.

Children enjoyed using the programs to explore patterns of shapes and colors, and the teachers capitalized on this interest by creating a class story using illustrations and writing generated from the computer software. The primary goals for this activity were enhancing children's development of sense of story and authorship and, because it was early in the school year, acquainting students with procedural knowledge necessary for operating the programs.

Many of the children had a fairly well-developed sense of story, as was evident from the stories they shared in play centers and at circle time. Building a class story, however, depended upon carrying a theme and characters through a series of related events. To foster a sense of community and at the same time recognize individual effort, teachers planned to have each child in the class contribute a page to the story.

As Hough, Nurss, and Wood (1987) have pointed out, children use more elaborate language when responding to a request for an original story than when telling a story to accompany a busy picture (a detailed drawing such as those found in the Where's Waldo? series by Martin Handford) or a wordless book. Like the busy picture and wordless book, the class story imposes several constraints on the storywriter or storyteller. Children must connect the events on their page with events on the previous page and build the action in the story around a character or group of characters. Using the computer as the medium for writing and drawing presents an additional challenge because it requires procedural knowledge. Children in this class had to know how to use the mouse and keyboard to access and manipulate objects. Because the children had experience pointing and clicking the mouse and typing letter strings with the keys, they were not afraid to explore how the hardware worked within the multimedia software. Knowledge of how to operate the programs themselves was developed through trial and error.

To help the children maintain a storyline, the teachers asked the class to identify a main character around whom events would be centered. The class brainstormed ideas and chose a princess. The teachers had students discuss some of the events in which the princess might participate—perhaps, for example, another character might get lost in the woods and meet a fairy princess. Students were then encouraged to make a page for the class story during free play time.

Through observations of peers, children learned that their pictures could be accompanied by print and thus most typed some text to go along with their drawings. When the children had finished their pages, the teachers asked them to read back what they had written. The dictations were inscribed underneath the children's writing. The teachers kept track of which children had completed their pages and often shared finished work with the class. This focused attention on the story and encouraged participation from those who had not made a contribution. Occasionally, a teacher would remind a child of the main character and of events from other children's pages, but such reminders were not routinely given. The teachers wanted the writing and drawing to originate from the children.

After all the children had completed a contribution, the teachers arranged the pages to create a series of events similar to those that one might expect a princess to experience in a fairy tale. The teacher chose a title for the story that reflected its open-ended nature and the cast of characters that accumulated when pages were put together. Although a conventional storyline did not emerge, much of the action in the story included elements of classic fairy tales—for example, walking in the woods (as in Red Riding Hood) and hiding in a special room in the castle (as in Sleeping Beauty). This was evidence that children drew upon prior knowledge of stories to create their story pages. Two other examples of story pages make reference to war and its consequences, an idea related to princesses and castles.

In the last page of the story, the princess is eaten up by the wolf, thus ending the tale with a note of finality. Interestingly, the children did not allow the princess's fate to prevent them from writing a sequel, which begins when she, still alive and in good health, is waiting to be freed from the wolf's stomach. The sequel was composed using Storybook Weaver Deluxe by The Learning Company, a program designed explicitly for writing and illustrating stories. Storybook Weaver features a collection of characters, settings, and props drawn from familiar folk literature and modern fantasy. These images help children apply what they already know about stories to composing story pages. Storybook Weaver, in contrast to the multimedia writing and math programs used for the original story, provides a structure that directly supports writing and understanding narrative texts.

While the goal of both class stories was to develop the children's sense of the narrative, some viewed the task of making their page as a chance to explore or manipulate objects on the screen. They treated the screen as a playground upon which to experiment with the nature and placement of icons and graphics (Labbo, 1996). For example, one child drew a house in the center of the screen, placed favorite objects in it, and added stamps and a drawing to outlying areas. She typed letter strings to accompany her picture; however, in her dictation the only part of the picture to which she made reference was the house. There was no indication that other objects on the screen represented characters mentioned in the dictation. This is consistent with studies of young children's writing development, which show that the meaning children assign to writing is dependent upon the context in which the writing is produced (Clay, 1975). The message a child attaches to a piece of writing after it is completed may be different from the child's intentions during its composition. An additional example of screen as playground can be seen in another child's work, where triangles, squares, and diamonds represent knights, bad guys, and sky. This is an example of transformational object play, wherein one object (shapes) stands for another (characters and setting) (Johnson, Christie, & Yawkey, as cited in Labbo, 1996).

A comparison of a student's page written with Kid Works II for the first class story and the same student's page for the sequel, written with Storybook Weaver, shows a similar use of screen as play space. On the first page, colorful ink blots stand for trees and the princess is a tiny green figure; on the second page, stereotypical representations of people and dogs go in search of a wolf that may have drowned in water, represented by an undersea landscape. On the first page, blots symbolize trees; on the second, figures appear as they do in the real world. This implies that a wider range of ways to symbolize meaning may be offered by programs that allow children to construct their own representations of objects and people.

Changes in the child's spelling development are also evident from first to second page. On the first page, the child wrote one sight word and then a series of letter strings; on the second page, the child used letter names to represent sounds in words. From the time of the first class book to the second, children had had many literacy experiences and several were able to spell at the letter-name stage.

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