Crumbs # 50 Vyacheslav or about getting ready to tell a story

Ingredients

• a group of A2 or A2+ kids preparing for the Cambridge Flyers or the Cambridge KET exam
• a set of the storytelling pictures from the exam writing materials
• a piece of paper and a pen

Procedure

• The teacher displays the visuals on the screen and tells the kids that they will be used to tell a story.
• The teacher asks the kids to look at the visuals and decide what their character is going to be called. Everyone writes the name down on their piece of paper.
• The teacher tells the kids to write down ten numbers, 1 – 10, and, when everyone is ready, to write ten things that they can see in all the pictures. These can be only nouns or a selection of nouns, verbs, adjectives etc.
• The teacher asks the kids to decide what kind of a story they are going to tell: a happy story, a sad story or a scary story. Everyone decides and draws a relevant smiley at the bottom of their list.
• The teacher divides the kids into pairs and sends them into breakout rooms to tell their stories. They have to use the name, all ten words and they have to make sure that their story has the mood they have chosen for it.
• Back in the common room, the kids give the group a summary of their story (‘It is a story about a boy who…’)

Why we like it

• The main aim for me in this particular lesson was to show the kids that even such uninspiring illustrations as the ones we used (and sadly, they were really boring this time) can be a start of a fun storytelling activity and that the final product’s quality depends only on the writers that is us.
• We are preparing for a progress test and a mock test and I am hoping that an activity of that kind will get the students ready for the independent work during the test itself. Looking at the visuals and making the list helped the students think of the words that they see and it helped to assure that they will be closer to getting to the required wordcount (35 words). If they have ten on their list already 30% of the way there. It also gave them the time necessary to really look at the pictures and to start thinking of what might be happening.
• From the word ‘Go’ the stories became personalised because the character got a name and became six different boys instantly, Fred, Bob, Tom and Vyacheslav among them. (‘Anka, but why Vyacheslav?‘ ‘I am not sure. I looked at him and I just thought he looks like a Vyacheslav‘).
• Deciding how the story will end in the beginning also helped to shape it. It was the first time we did it and for that reason I only offered three options: a happy story, a sad story and a scary story but that list can be easily extended. We shared how we were planning to tell the story before we went into the breakout rooms and among our six stories there were three happy stories, one sad story, one scary story (mine) and one ‘ill story’ because one of my students decided that his character is going to catch a cold in the end. Anyway, from the very beginning the kids knew where they were taking their Fred and their Bob. They also knew that their partner’s story will be a bit different so, hopefully, they were more interested in listening to it. There was some variety in the group so I could put them up in a pair whose angle was different.
• It can be easily done in the classroom but it works amazingly well in the online classes and this is how it came to be. I wanted to avoid sharing the visuals and wasting time on opening them.
• It is easy and it can be a speaking activity in its own right or it can work as a story-writing preparation task as it was in our case. Consequently, a set of three pictures can be used (Flyers and KET writing tasks) or a set of five pictures (Flyers speaking tasks).
• As a potential follow-up, the kids can write the story for homework.
• Next time (and there will defnitely be another round of this activity), I am going to add a more communicative element that will give them a proper listening task and that will give them an opportunity to interact with their partner’s story such as retelling the story they have heard in the breakout rooms, creating a title for their partner’s story or continuing it (‘The next day…’). I know that choosing the best story is sometimes suggested with this kind of an activity but, to be honest, I am not a fan. Not everything needs to be a competition.