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Stories are a perfect way to learn a language. The “narrative drive” is built deep within us and across cultures (Harmer & Puchta, 2018). We are naturally atuned to story.
Complementing any story based lesson with images is a powerful way to prompt students to use language in the classroom. Here are a few ideas and resources for these kinds of picture + story lessons.
Tell The Picture Story. Students are provided with a series of flashcards, pictures, images and they must write or tell the story. See examples through our “Tell The Story” student workbook.
Story Dominoes. Present a series of pictures that are seemingly unconnected. Students must connect them to create and tell the story. See this example.
Video Story Prompts. Use a video (really just a series of pictures/images) to start the story. Then stop the video and have students write or retell the ending. See this video “Seen” for a perfect such prompt.
Introductions. Pictures are great for making personal introductions. Have students bring in 3-5 pictures and then tell a story about themselves using the pictures.
Chain Stories. Using some picture flashcards, have students begin a story “Once upon a time …” and continue the story by making one sentence for each flashcard. Continue until all flashcards are used.
Picture Prompts. Get one sensational image and show it to students. Students then make, tell, write a story around it. See our full book of amazing writing prompts on this topic.
These are just some of the many ways you can combine pictures and stories in your lessons! Let us know some other ways you combine the two.
Lastly, we now have a private video lesson platform for Year Subscribers - Top Youtube. Or you may purchase it separately. Info. here. It’s stellar. Each lesson full described and you don’t need to register, just use the password to enter, that we’ll send after purchase.