Short stories

Introduction

Reading is certainly one of the greatest strategies to gain new vocabulary while learning a foreign language. Once you get acquainted with the variety of genre, you understand that there are kinds of reading more simple than others. For example, a novel is surely more complex than a short story. Short stories are excellent for those who doesn't have the habbit of reading and want to start somewhere. Furthermore, they have enough vocabulary, grammar imput, several themes and most important of all, there are short.

Task

Now, you are a writer of short stories. Choose a literary genre of your taste; it can be: romance, mystery, scifi, horror, comedy, thriller and so forth. Write a one page short story with as many characters as you like, but you have to use the verb tenses that we've learn so far: simple present and present continuous. When you are done, I'm the not the one who will correct it first, but a classmate. As soon as yout peer correction is finished, it's my turn. By the end of the activity, the class gets to choose three short stories to interpret.

Process

Before writing, its important to know how many literary genres do we have in English. Go to the website below, learn about the literary genres and choose the one you like the most.

Now, it's time for your story. After choosing the genre, think about the plot, its characters, the place where it happens. Use the steps from the website below to guide your ideas.

When you're finished, send your short story to your classmate's email and when you both are done, send the stories to mine:

Report to the class about your classmate's short story and after listening to everybody's stories, the class will pick three to later portray.

Evaluation

This project will be evaluated by the following aspects:

  1. Writing of a one page short story according to the guidelines from the websites;

  2. Peer correction;

  3. Content (vocabulary and grammar);

  4. Presentation of the play;

Conclusion

Ladies and gentlemen! You're indeed an artist. I hope that this activity improved your learning by challenging you to create in a foreigner language and most important of all, I hope you did enjoy yourself while doing it. Keep calm and write stories in English!

Credits

Teacher Page

This activity is develop for intermidiate students who have seen simple present and present continuous and have practice enough writing to know the structure of the language. The students have previously seen the content of "literary genres" before thanks to a lesson of their textbook.