5 Creative Writing Activity Ideas: Walking Down the Street

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.

This writing activity uses an empty street photo as a prompt to help students revise tenses while writing the opening paragraph of a story. 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:

Writing Activity Questions: 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?

Writing Activity Questions: 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.

This writing activity works particularly well because it gives students a real choice in how they approach the same prompt. The narrative version pulls them into storytelling and past tenses, while the present tense version puts them directly into the scene, describing what they see and feel in the moment. Both versions can lead to rich follow-up discussions about word choice, atmosphere, and how tense shapes the mood of a piece of writing.

If you enjoy writing activities that combine a visual prompt with grammar practice, you might also like A Fun Conditional Activity and A Letter to the Future.