Once upon a time… – creative writing

How to make an interesting use of Past Simple and Past Continuous? How to make writing pleasant? Introduce creative writing to your lessons!

Level: Pre-Intermediate, Intermediate
Aimed at: Teenagers
Aims: Past Simple and Past Continuous revision, writing exercises
Time: +/- 90min
What you need: dictionaries

Preparations:
Teacher prepares  on small pieces of paper (or sticky papers) set of 8 words connected with fairytales  for example: forest, king, queen, tower, rose, princess, sword, knight, dark, rain, star, night, tournament, mountains. Each paper has different set of words. Papers are placed in a box or a jar.

Procedure:

1. At the beginning of the lesson teacher asks students if they like stories. After receiving the answers teachers asks what words usually are present in stories/fairytales and writes them on the board (ex. once upon a time… , then, next, one day, miles away from here, far far away).
2. Teacher explains that the lesson is devoted to making use of 2 past tenses that students already know and writes their names on the board. Then teacher asks the students to quickly revise the tenses (When do you use it? What do you have to remember about sentence structure? etc.)
3. Then, teacher writes the aim of the lesson and explains that students are to write a story of different kinds depending on their imagination but under a few rules:
   1. All sentences are in past tenses;
   2. The story is of minimum 250 words;
   3. Students have to use 8 words that they will get from the box.
4. Students have time to write an outline of the story.
5. Students are given dictionaries and write the stories.
6. Students read their stories aloud to the class .

Comments:
Students may be graded for their work. Lists of words should be adapted to students’ language level. The stories may be used to create a school’s magazine issue or printed as a mini-book, or placed on the school’s website.
Enjoy!

Agnieszka Walczak