Sunday 1 April 2012

Stories & sequences

Good morning!
As you can tell, I've been inspired to go back and fill in a few holes in this blog - games that I had neglected to add before plus some new ones I've come across. Hope thy are helpful!
This game is great in that it isn't just aimed at drilling single words or really short snippets - instead, students tell a story based on picture prompts.

Firstly, line up a series of related pictures (perhaps 4 to 12 pictures, depending on age & ability of your students). Get students to give a sentence for each picture to create a story. As each sentence is added, go back to the start and say all of the sentences thus far in order (probably chorally). Once you have covered all of the pictures, get students to close their eyes and remove one or two pictures, then students re-tell the whole story, including the missing pictures. Repeat until no pics left.
If getting individuals to tell back the story rather than the whole class chorally, I would be more than happy if my students were paraphrasing as the pictures disappear rather than sticking to the memorised / rehearsed sentences, but there's the support of "rehearsedness" for those who aren't quite ready for that. Retelling the story chorally gives that extra support of "class memory" also.