Themed story worlds
Stories on the website are zoned under seven themed ‘worlds’ – Adventure, Baby and Toddler, Fairytales and Folktales, Families and Friendships, Funny, Open House and Slimy Scary. Each of these book worlds has a different look.
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The Baby and Toddler world is designed to be used by adults with very young children when they are learning to read and speak English. In that way it’s different from all the other worlds which have been created to be accessible by children themselves – although the experts advise that, particularly in the early years, storytelling is best as a shared experience.
See the Books and Babies section for more advice on reading stories with very young children.
Open House is a magical mystery tour offering everything from rhymes and poems, to comics, non-fiction books and useful child-friendly advice on video. This zone is particularly useful for teachers – offering stimulating content to help deliver key stages of the curriculum.
Ranking books
How do we choose which book goes into which zone?
Books are not easily categorised into themes – and on Signed Stories many will appear in more than one of the story zones, because they contain elements of several genres.
We use a 1-5 ranking system to decide where to put books.
For example, a book which is high in Slimy Scary content ranks 5, but may also be amusing in places and so ranks 2 in Funny. This book would appear larger on the Slimy Scary zone home page than on the Funny zone home page. The bigger the book image, the more it reflects the key theme of the zone in which it sits.
Don’t forget to use the scroll bar (at the top of the page) within the zones to see the books which might be off the edge of the page.
