Picture stories

This activity can be done in class once adequate work on past tenses has been carried out.

  1. Tell the class that they are going to make up a story together.
  2. The teacher can decide whether or not to provide a title and/ or setting.
  3. Place one picture of a person on the board and ask one student to start the story. (They may need some help with this the first time.)
  4. At an appropriate time (this could be after two minutes, or an agreed number of sentences, or even irregularly as decided by the teacher) place another picture on the board. The pictures should be new to the students and should be picked out at random.
  5. Another student then takes over and continues the same story.
  6. This continues until either the pictures have been finished, the story has come to a convenient end or a certain time limit has been reached.
  7. The story should be recorded and can then be played back.
  8. The story could be typed out (including mistakes) by the teacher for a subsequent lesson. It could be handed out to the class and the students could then work in pairs to correct the language of the story.
  9. The story could then be recorded again, either one copy for a class or one copy per pair, and then played back.
  10. Any corrections needed could then be picked up by the teacher.