I use flashcards to introduce and revise vocabulary and I was thinking about what else I could do with them. I chose 7-10 of them that seemed to make sense together and thought I could ask my pupils to write a story based on them. These are the steps that I followed:
1. I slowly showed the class the flashcards one by one (e.g. a boy- a girl – the sea – a goldfish – a cat – a box – a dog).
2. I told them I wanted them to think of a story based on the flashcards.
3. A pupil came to the blackboard to write the story, as narrated by his/her classmates.
4. I showed the class the first flashcard and asked for the first sentence of the story.
5. I continued with the rest of the flashcards one after the other.
This is the story they came up with on that day: “One day, a boy called Jason and a girl called Mia went on a date. They decided to go to the beach. They went swimming, ate some ice cream and then went to Jason’s home. ‘Is it ok if I bring my cat along?’ asked Mia. ‘Yes, it’s fine,’ said Jason. He had a goldfish in his house, but Mia’s cat grabbed it and ate it! Mia felt really bad about it and a few days later she went to Jason’s house with a box. Jason opened it and saw a little dog inside. It was Mia’s present to him.”
It was an activity that worked. My teenage pupils loved it and each time asked for a different set of flashcards!
Note: This idea of stories based on flashcards was further developed by Alexandra Chistyakova, an English teacher at the Physics faculty of Moscow State University, Russia.
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