Activity 1: Judging a Book by its Cover
Buy some affordable used novels and remove the covers or use the Digital Children's Library [http://en.childrenslibrary.org/] and print only the covers.
Give each pair of students a cover and ask them to invent the basic story line based on the cover and title.
Activity 2: Creating a Story
· Make a deck of 24 cards depicting characters, events, or places related to a story. Each group receives a deck of cards. In groups of two to three, students take turns flipping over a card and adding to the story based on the character or event.
· An example of a deck of cards comes from Sánchez, J. & Sanz, C. (1993). Jugando en español: Actividades interactivas para la clase de español. Niveles elemental-intermedio. Berlin: Langenscheidt.
Activity 3: Making Connections
· Provide groups of students with two or three pictures. Make the activity challenging by using pictures that are usually not associated with one another.
· Students then come up with the connection between the pictures and share their connections with group members. The same pictures will generate different connections.
· This activity comes from: Wright, A., Betteridge, D., & Buckby, M. (2006). Games for language learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Activity 4: Choose Your Own Adventure
· Prepare an intriguing opening line to a story focusing on a certain vocabulary theme and/or grammatical structure. Organize students into groups of four to five and ask the first student to repeat the opening to the story, and then add another line. The next person in the circle repeats the first two lines, adding a third.
· The groups continue to practice the four or five line story then all groups share with the class to see how different stories evolved from the same introduction. When all groups have presented, the class votes by applause for the most creative story.