An alternative way of supporting children in understanding story structure is to guide them carefully through the process of creating a story, maintaining a limited number of characters, settings, and events in the text. Hough, Nurss, and Wood (1987), for example, demonstrated that wordless books and busy pictures stimulate story language, provided that the teacher highlights the storyline by connecting events and characters. Here a parent offers this type of support in a different setting.

Robert, a five-year-old boy, wrote “Robert's Story” in collaboration with his mother. His work shows that with appropriate guidance children can develop a story that contains all elements of story structure. Robert had a good sense of this structure to draw upon in composing his story because he and his mother spent time sharing folk literature and other popular childhood stories as part of their daily routine. Evidence of Robert's familiarity with folk literature can be found in his choice of settings, characters, events, and story language. Robert, the main character of the story, must find a secret cave in order to make his way to Santa's house. He encounters talking animals who guide his journey and help him overcome some of the obstacles (e.g., a collapsing bridge) in his path. These obstacles are reminiscent of the tests given to protagonists in fairy and folktales. For example, in East of the Sun and West of the Moon, by Peter Christen Asbjornsen and Jorgen E. Moe, the heroine travels over steep mountains and on the back of the wind to be reunited with her prince. Like the kindergartners who wrote pages for a class story, Robert used elements from traditional tales to compose his story.

Robert's mother supported his efforts to compose a story in several ways. She helped him operate the program to select settings and characters, and she typed as he dictated the storyline. She also maintained her son's focus by asking him to retell parts of the story, reminding him of previous events and characters' involvement in the events, and commenting on connections between the child's story ideas and familiar folk literature. The story language and events are Robert's creation, because his mother was careful not to contribute her own ideas to the story. She, like the kindergarten teachers, believed that the story should reflect the child's ideas.

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