Printable story map

"What goes wrong" is the box that makes this a story map rather than a list. A child who plans a beginning, a middle and an end without one writes an account of a day out: they went to the beach, they had chips, they came home. Something has to go wrong for the middle to be about anything, and asking for it on its own line — before any of the three boxes — is the cheapest way to get it.

It works just as well backwards, on a book somebody has read rather than a story they are inventing, and that is comprehension rather than composition without being a different sheet. Filling in the same six boxes from a chapter book is a harder exercise than it looks: naming what went wrong in a story you did not write is most of what a reading comprehension question is asking.

Every rule, every box and every cut line on the page above is drawn as ink rather than as a background color, which is why it comes out of the printer looking like it does on screen: browsers throw background paint away unless somebody has ticked Background graphics, and a page of cut guides that printed invisibly is a page somebody cuts freehand. The lengths are in inches for a plainer reason still — a card that says it is three and three quarter inches wide is going to be measured, and a die that is not square does not fold up. The number in the footer is the seed the sheet was built from, so the identical sheet can be had again next term.

This page is one sheet out of four families that between them print the forms, the week, the paper that gets cut up and the two things that are objects rather than pages. How many rows a chart has, how many cards there are to a page, how much room each answer gets, which verse is on it and whether a tag folds are all settings — so a chore chart with six rows, or a dated calendar for next March, is the same sheet with one control moved rather than a page somebody has to have written first.

The settings travel in the link rather than on a server, so a sheet you make can be bookmarked or sent to another family as it stands — and the Name: line, where a sheet has one, is printed blank, because there is nowhere in a shared link to put a child’s name. See what we don’t collect.