The story
Deep in Earth's next ice age, stories have become the fuel for life. In the remote outpost of Storyhaven the townsfolk gather to tell their tales. Now though, this precious resource is disappearing. Someone is stealing the town's stories. Deprived of their fuel the fablehearths will go out, the ice will creep back in and families will perish in their beds. In a last desperate roll of the dice, the town’s story shamans develop a perilous means of time travel to allow their most intrepid explorers to journey back into the past to save the town's tales before they can disappear.
The context
Children reading for pleasure at 10 years old is a stronger predictor of academic success than parents’ level of education (Sullivan & Brown, 2015). The powerful mental stimulus of reading boosts children's creativity and literacy skills, as well as positive social and emotional development (Whitten et al., 2016). Reading for pleasure, however, is on the decline as books must compete with video games, streaming TV and mobile phones for children's attention (Clarke & Picton, 2020). Social media like Instagram and Tiktok is increasingly recognised as damaging to young people's mental wellbeing (Rogers & Rousseau, 2022), monetising their need for social recognition from their peers to generate advertising revenue.
The game of Storyhaven
Storyhaven is an immersive reading and roleplaying game for children aged 7-13 years old to play with their friends and family, in which they become adventurers from the town of Storyhaven, sent back into the past to save the townsfolk's tales and rewrite them.
By creating a richly social reading experience and bringing the story world to life through immersive theatre techniques, Storyhaven aims to welcome more children into the world of books, as well as challenging established readers with an innovative new format for children's fiction that encourages them to co-author the narrative alongside us.
Storyhaven's powerful invitation to extend its story world from the inside builds children's skills of writing, critical thinking, creativity and self-expression.
The experience is driven by a team reading game that can be played on a mobile phone, tablet or laptop. 2-6 players navigate their way together through episodes of a branching narrative (choose-your-own-adventure story), talking decisions over together in a way that creates a fun, bonding social experience.
Storyhaven can be played in a few sessions over one weekend, or spread out longer, like the shared reading of a children's book, over 2-6 weeks, creating a parallel ice-age world you can dip into whenever you have the time for a little more. The reading game remembers where you were in the narrative, so you only have to open it again on your device to continue your journey together.
At key points in the plot the words are brought to life through video messages from immersive theatre actors playing characters from the story world in a way that makes the reading experience attractive to reluctant readers, as well as providing established readers with a thrilling new digital media experience.
Episodes designed for team play lead into episodes for lone reading, which differentiates players' experience of the story world, promoting dialogue in the next session of team play. If children play with their friends this harnesses social peer-group experiences to power real changes to children's reading habits at home.
Children are invited to create their own player characters from one of the Storyhaven town guilds, which gives them different skills to use during gameplay, allowing every player to feel like they have contributed to the success of the mission. The illustrations have been designed to be an inclusive invitation for diverse children to imagine themselves at the heart of the adventure.
Immersion in the game is supported by physical props like a printable map of the town, which can be spread out in front of you when playing around a table or carried with you on a car journey or camping trip to support your shared imagining of the story world.
Children love creatively adapting objects they find lying around the house to support their games of make-believe. Storyhaven plays to this need to make a story their own from the inside. An old leather satchel might be transformed into an improvised adventuring bag; a handkerchief and some painted pebbles could become a pouch containing the crystal story runes you will save and rewrite on your adventure.
The more the children are allowed to contribute to crafting the experience, the more special it will become to them, and the more powerfully they will be motivated by the fiction.
Children keep an adventure journal during gameplay, in which they rewrite the stories they save on their adventure into the town's past. The stories are enshrined within crystal rune stones, gifted to members of the town to enshrine the key meanings of their tale. This device helps children to understand that stories can always be reworked and passed on anew, and helps them towards becoming authors themselves as they rewrite the story world from the inside.
They are also encouraged to keep notes on the development of their character and clues to the mystery of who is stealing the town's stories, which helps build literacy skills of note-taking and responsibility for their own learning. By the end of the experience the children will have compiled a real literacy achievement that they can show to family and friends, which further encourages their storytelling and self-expression.
The alluringly designed pages of the journal are provided with the game, printable from any home printer. Instructions for how to make a DIY ancient cover are also included, which boosts children's ownership of the experience and pride in their literacy development.
Storyhaven in schools
Storyhaven combines collaborative reading, immersive storytelling, performance and creative activities in a format designed for classrooms and school libraries. Pupils work together to interpret the story, negotiate decisions and develop their own responses to the fictional world.
Hours of class time and schedule
There are two versions of Storyhaven included in the digital materials to give teachers and librarians flexibility with how much time they want to dedicate to the experience:
3-episode version
9.5 hours class/library time over 1-4 weeks
1-2 hours reading at home
5-episode version
15 hours class/library time over 2-6 weeks or as a whole term project
2-4 hours reading at home
Storyhaven’s rich, narrative-driven engagement can easily be extended beyond these hours into further activities, ideas for which are included in the teacher’s notes.
CPD sessions for teachers
A Wonderspun practitioner with experience running Storyhaven in schools can provide online training sessions for up to 6 teachers or librarians from the same school who are interested in running the experience.
These could count as Continuing Professional Development or Continuing Education in the following areas:
- Reading and writing development
- English language and literacy
- Fostering self-expression and creativity
- Team-building exercises
- Boosting dialogue, negotiation and empathy
- Encouraging library use and reading practice at home
- Narrative-driven learning
- Creative writing development
- Inclusion and diversity
- Drama, roleplay and immersive theatre techniques
- Interactive fiction and games in learning
Integration with national curriculums and education programmes
Storyhaven has been designed to complement existing literacy teaching rather than replace it. Its collaborative reading, discussion and creative activities provide opportunities for pupils to develop many of the knowledge and skills expected within the UK National Curriculum English Programme of Study at Key Stages 2 and 3 and within the Success for All Literacy Programme.
- Shared reading, discussion and interpretation of extended fictional texts.
- Reading fluency, comprehension and inference through collaborative decision-making.
- Speaking and listening through structured discussion, debate and performance.
- Creative writing inspired by character, setting, roleplay and immersive narrative.
- Vocabulary development through rich literary language in meaningful contexts.
- Confidence in reading for pleasure through sustained engagement with an ongoing story.
- Teamwork, communication and problem-solving through collaborative gameplay.
- Reflection, empathy and perspective-taking through narrative choices.
Cross-curriculum learning
Storyhaven encourages the deep learning and transferable skills that come from cross-curricular projects. There are opportunities for pupils to make theatrical props to support their reading and writing adventure, linking with subjects such as Art and Design, Design and Technology, and Drama. Its incorporation of mobile phones and tablets into a new-media narrative form brings ICT into play. The branching narrative was designed using Twine, an open-source tool for interactive, nonlinear storytelling that students could also use after Storyhaven to begin learning about programming, coding and digital storytelling.
The narrative touches on themes of immigration, climate change, geography, astronomy, diversity, world history, oral storytelling, and technological and scientific innovation, allowing it to be integrated with cross-curricular projects and term topics already running in school.
Non-native English-speaking students and use in ESL or EFL classrooms
Our team has over twenty years’ experience of Teaching English as a Foreign Language at institutions such as the British Council in different countries across the world. Storyhaven’s group-reading dynamics allow stronger readers to support weaker ones as teams negotiate the narrative together. Its chunked text breaks a long, novel-length story into smaller, more digestible passages and episodes, gradually leading non-native English-speaking children into a rich and prolonged fictional experience in English that can support language learning as well as reading-for-pleasure habits.
Teachers can introduce vocabulary, model fluent reading, assign differentiated roles and use the story world as a springboard for speaking, writing and performance activities.
SEN inclusivity
The branching narrative of Storyhaven breaks a longer reading narrative into smaller, less overwhelming sections with a coloured background to help the letters stand out. Because it is read from a tablet, mobile phone or laptop, the size of the text and the number of words per line can also be adjusted, which may be more comfortable for students with dyslexia.
As Storyhaven is a group activity, students can listen to others reading the passages even if they find it stressful to read aloud themselves. Pupils can contribute by keeping notes and statistics, drawing and decorating, finding the team’s position on the map, or performing passages being read. This creates an inclusive experience in which different kinds of learners can find a role and contribute to the success of the group.