
The activity should work at most levels above elementary, as long as your students have some knowledge of past tenses, but it works best when they also know past continuous / progressive too. All you need to get things started is a sheet of plain paper for each pair of students.
The listening part comes first:
- Ask the students to draw the face of a person in the top right-hand corner of the page.
- Once they've done this ask them to give the person a name.
- Then on the top left of the page ask them to write five adjectives to describe the person's appearance.
- Next ask them to write five more adjectives to describe the person's character.
- After they've done this ask the students to write three things that the person likes doing.
- Then ask them to write who the person lives with.
In this way they build up a character profile for the person they are going to write about.
The writing part:
- Now dictate the following sentence to your students: 'It was a dark and stormy night and'. Stop at this point and ask them to write in the name of the person they have drawn and followed by the word 'was'.
- Then ask the students to complete the sentence from their imagination and add one more sentence.
- Once all the students have added a sentence to their stories, get them to stop and pass the paper to the pair on their right (this means that every pair of students now has a new character).
- The students then read through the information and the beginning of the story and then add one more sentence to it.
- Once they've done this you ask them once more to pass the paper to the next pair on their right. Continue to do this with each pair of students adding a sentence to each story, gradually building up each story as the papers are passed around the class.
- Continue with this until you decide that the students are starting to lose interest or have written enough and then tell them to finish the story.
Follow up:
- Once all the stories are complete there are a number of follow-up options you can try.
- Put the stories up around the class and get the students to read them all and decide which is best.
- Give each pair of students a story and get them to try to find and correct errors.
- Get the students to write the stories up on a computer and then ask them to add more description and detail to the stories.
This activity is fun and creative and has always worked well for me both with adults and younger students.
Comments
story writing
Theoretical supports (Education) for this practical lesson-plan
Thank you for such a detailed
Be creative
This is a nice post
actually you can also try pen
What's the connection?
Hello Nik
I really like your activity but i can't see the connection between "a dark and stormy night" and a person's appearance and character. The topic we are studying now is exactly the same. And I don't know how my students should use the information they've already written down about their character(I mean the description of a previous classmate). The thing is that I'm working with hard-of-hearing children and I must explain them eveything in details.
Creative Writing Cliche
Hi Nik and Alexandra,
I read your post and reply, and I think that quite possibly Nik was using the "dark and stormy" night reference for three reasons:
1) It's the starting point of the story that is used for the person the students have described.
2) It's a common cliche in creative writing to think of "Once upon a time..." for fairy tales or "It was a dark and stormy night" for ghost stories. I don't mean to jump to conclusions, and I apologize to Nik if I missed his point, but this is what seems to be the natural connection to me.
3) A dark and stormy night describe the visual aspect of the evening, but not the details of what happened. This is much the same as judging someone by their appearance.......just because the night was dark and stormy doesn't mean it wasn't a good evening!
Nik, I think this is a great idea....especially for younger writers who are interested in creative writing!
Stephanie
Excellent teaching style
I've go through the whole teaching method and found a different style of a teacher, who tried to create a method of teaching which really help to students for thinking and learning together.
Thank you for this wonderful and creative activities that draw learners skills come out to the open. This is a big help to engage learners to learn, develop and improve themselves in the field of writing.