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This is a lesson plan designed for lower-level (A2-B1) teenagers. It is designed to help students write short stories using different narrative tenses, sequences and discourse markers.
Preparation
All you need is plenty of paper and a pen for each student.
Procedure
Sit students in a circle and give them each a pen and piece of paper. Tell them that they are going to write stories together; if you have 8 student, at the end of the class they will have written 8 stories.
Write on the board:
Once, there was a man/woman called ……. who….
Tell students to copy the sentence onto their piece of paper, decide if the character is a man or a woman and give them a name.
Students then pass the piece of paper to the left; they must then complete the first sentence, for example:
Once, there was a man called Jimmy who lived under a bridge.
Students then pass the paper again, and copy down and complete the following:
One day ….. was …..ing….
For example:
One day Jimmy was walking down the street
Students pass again and complete the following:
when…+ past simple
One day Jimmy was walking down the street when he saw a police car driving towards him.
Continue the process but now start to introduce different words to begin the sentences, the whole writing process will look like this:
- Once there was a man/woman called …who…
- Complete sentence 1.
- One day …. was….ing
- Complete sentence 3: when…..
- Suddenly….
- Fortunately….
- Unfortunately….
- And in the end….
- And the moral of the story is….
While students are writing try to monitor and help them with vocab and narrative tenses. When they have all finished have them read out their stories one by one and then vote on their favourite one.
Follow up
Students write another story using the same basic structure for homework.