image credit: Pixabay
If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.
Lewis Carroll
From today on, I’m going to add lesson ideas that can be used in our virtual classrooms. Here is a writing activity to revise tenses.
Use an empty street photo as a prompt for this activity. Create a Google Form and add your questions on it. I chose Google Forms for this activity because sometimes kids and teens will feel uncomfortable when everybody reads what they have written so for their privacy the Google Form will be a great option.
Tell them they are going to write the introductory paragraph of a story or a novel today. They can use the following questions to form their paragraphs or they can go with the flow.
The character is walking in an empty street:
Narrative Tenses:
What time was it? Why was he/she there? Where was he/she going? Was he/she alone? Why was the street empty? How was the weather? How was he/she feeling? What had happened before he/she went out?
Present Continuous and Present Simple
You are walking in an empty street. Why are you there? Where are you going? Why is the street empty? How are you feeling? Are you alone? How is the weather? What are you thinking?
Follow-up:
- You can choose the mistakes and create an ‘error correction’ activity.
- You can copy and paste the paragraphs without students’ names on another Google Form and ask the students to vote. You can put your students in groups in break-out rooms and ask them to write a collaborative story with the winning paragraph. You can collect all the stories on a Padlet or a Google Slide. You can even create an e-book with their stories. To add more spice and colour to the e-book, you can ask them to take a photo of their streets from their windows and send them to you.