Writing a short story Lesson plan Topic Narratives Level: E3+ / Intermediate 1+ / B2+ Time: 1.5 hours Aims • To develop students’ ability to generate ideas for writing a short story • To provide students with the tools and structure for writing a short story • To give practice in describing and giving opinions on pictures Introduction This lesson provides students with a framework to generate and sequence their ideas in order to write a short story. You will need: • Realia: a child’s story book, with pictures • Post-it notes or small sticky slips of paper – 10 per group of 4-5 students for warmer • Scissors (1 per group) • Resource A: enlarge and cut up so each of the 5 photos is separate. Also prepare one normal-sized copy for each group • Worksheet 1 – one per student • Worksheet 2 – one per student Procedure Warmer - (15 mins) • Divide the class into 4 groups and hand out 10 post-it notes to each group. Elicit the following senses: sight / touch / hearing (or sound). • Tell students to write as many adjectives as possible for each sense. Instruct students to write only one adjective on each post-it. • Place the 5 enlarged photos from Resource A on the wall around the room. • Tell students to take their post-it adjectives and attach each to a suitable photo. • Now ask them to check all the pictures and remove any post-its that are not adjectives. • Monitor and check for grammar (i.e. adjective, not noun). Task 1 – (15 mins) Discuss essential elements of a narrative story • Draw everyone’s attention to one of the photos on the wall. Choose one with lots of adjectives. • Explain that every picture tells a story, including the one they are looking at. Elicit reasons for focusing on the 3 senses in the warmer. (A good story appeals to all the senses and using them helps to create atmosphere and set the scene). Elicit the other two senses, smell and taste. • Write on the board: Who is in the picture? How does the person feel? Where are they? What is happening? Why? What is happening next? Discuss in pairs before group feedback. • Allocate one of the other 4 photos on the wall from Resource A to each group. • Tell students to read the adjectives on the post-it notes that go with the photo and to answer the questions on the board. • Monitor to support and encourage ideas. Confident speakers can feed back to the class. 1 © British Council 2012 Writing a short story Task 2 – (15 mins) Identify and match parts of a narrative story structure (Speaking) • Introduce your Realia: a children’s story book and show the front cover. • Tell students that this is a story you know and it begins, ‘Once upon a time’. Elicit ways of beginning a children’s story that are used in their country. • Explain that good stories often follow a logical sequence from the beginning to the end. • Copy the story mountain shape from Worksheet 1 onto a Whiteboard/Smartboard and mark each of the 5 stages but without writing what they are. • On a different part of the board, write up the headings in a random order: Beginning, Ending, Build-up, Problem, Resolution. • Hand out a copy of Worksheet 1 to each student and tell them to complete the story mountain by filling in 5 the boxes with the correct heading. Elicit group feedback and check the meaning of build-up and resolution by asking them to explain the terms in their own words. • Put students into small groups of 3 or 4 and hand out Resource A (one per group) and tell them that they are going to try and make a story using all the photos, using the story mountain shape. • The students should spend a couple of minutes deciding which picture comes 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th in the story. • Explain that there is no correct answer and it is their choice. If they don’t agree with each other, they will have to negotiate. • Ask students to cut up their pictures, put them in their chosen order and then talk about their story in their group. • Hand out Worksheet 2 and ask students to think where these questions could be answered within the story mountain framework. • Feed back stories after 15 minutes and discuss any common errors that you noticed during the discussion. Don’t focus too heavily on spoken grammar as this is a fluency exercise. Differentiation: encourage early finishers to think about how the 5 senses fit into each picture. Answers: Stages of the story mountain: 1.Beginning 2.Build-up 3.Problem 4.Resolution 5.Ending Task 3 – (15 mins) Choose language to add interest to a story • Using the same picture that you used in Task 1, ask the students to give you a simple sentence to talk about it. Ask a student to write this below the picture. Call this sentence 1. • Elicit ways to make the sentence more interesting (adverbs/adjectives/action verbs, etc – any ideas welcome). Write these ideas around the picture, in a spidergram format. • Encourage students to work in pairs to write another sentence about the picture. Call this sentence 2. • When students have written their sentence, give the following instructions, modifying them according to the level of your students: • Add an adjective before a noun and an adverb for the verb. • Use a different the verb. • Change the tense (if present) of the sentence into past simple or future. • Change the sentence around – e.g. if ‘there was a man in an airport’, rewrite the sentence putting the man first – ‘a man was in the airport’. • Add a sentence about what happened next. • Now tell the students to write sentence 1 and sentence 2 next to each other and join them together by adding a linking word– e.g. suddenly / but / because. Monitor for spelling mistakes and ask students to peer-correct. 2 © British Council 2012 Writing a short story • Encourage students to share their joined sentences by reading them aloud. Students could write their sentences on card and display on the wall next to the appropriate picture. Cooler - Talk about a story you know (15 mins) Speaking/Listening • Ask students to sit down, close their eyes, and think back to a place they know well and a story from that place. • Students should think about the beginning, middle and end. Think about who is in the story, how they feel, where it takes place, what happens, why, and what happens next. Also think about what they see, hear, smell, taste etc. • Students open their eyes and in small groups tell each other about the story they remember. Extension / Homework • Tell students to write their short story in class or for homework. • Remind students that their story should appeal to all the senses, follow the structure of Worksheet 1 and answer the questions in Worksheet 2. • They can get inspiration for their actual story from wherever they like: • They could write the story they thought about in the cooler or rewrite one they heard in their childhood. They could even randomly select 5 photos from: http://5card.cogdogblog.com/play.php and use these as a way to generate ideas. • If your students respond to a competitive element, set up a short story competition and ask another teacher or class to be the judges. 3 © British Council 2012