Holidays: Christmas free style story telling

I've had lots of fun with this idea and it is suitable for a wide range of levels as the students determine the vocabulary. First I get the students to brain storm Christmas vocabulary, first about ten to fifteen nouns, then the same number of verbs. As they shout out the words I write each one on a small card. We then repeat this process with vocab totally unrelated to Christmas. I then mix and shuffle all the verb cards together and all the noun cards and make two piles with the words face down. Then sitting in a circle we begin to tell a Christmas story in simple present or simple past depending in which tense I want them to practice. I begin, I take one verb and one noun and in two or three sentences start the story using the verb and the noun. The next person to my left then takes a noun and a verb card and takes up the story using these words. And so the story continues until all the cards are gone. I've often wished I'd written these stories down but there was always another crazy tale awaiting me with the next group.
Jane O'Brien
Hamburg, Germany
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