I am using stories more and more often in my lessons as I believe my students greatly benefit from listening to them as well as reading them and writing new ones. Apart from inventing my own stories, my favorite source is The Comprehensible Classroom which has a wealth of fantastic resources and story scripts. Recently I have also used Martin Lapworth’s website who also posts many resources connected to TaskMagic (a software which allows you to create different exercises based on a text or a list of vocabulary). The short-story script I used from his site is “¿Quieres salir conmigo?“which is about asking someone to go out / arranging to go out, with lots of high frequency expressions such as:
(no) quiero / quieres / quiere + inf
(no) me / te / le gusta + inf
porque
así que
voy / va / van
está + feeling
es + description
conmigo / contigo / con él / ella

This fitted perfectly with the topic I covered with grade 7 (12-13 years old) about free time.

Listening: I first told the story to my students “TPRS style” (again I am not a trained TPRS teacher but I have read a lot about this concept lately!) with the help of my puppet fingers. I tried to do a lot of circling with the key structures so that students are not only listening but are also interacting. This way of “delivering” a story is greatly beneficial to students because they hear a lot of comprehensible input and they also repeat a lot of high frequency structures.

Reading: I then used Martin Lapworth’s worksheetsas a reading activity for my students to “internalize” the story. I didn’t use all of the worksheets but some of them such as the one where students have to put the segments of the story in the correct order or the one where you have to fill in the gaps.

Speaking Project: when I felt students were comfortable with using the key structures they needed to create their own stories, I set them on the “video project”. Students worked in groups of 2-3 and had to imagine a similar story, write the script and then film it using puppets or anything else they wanted to use. The “making” process took more lessons than expected but I believe it was worthwhile! Here are some videos which I posted on my YouTube account: