This activity helps students develop their speaking, writing, and listening skills.
It also fosters critical thinking skills, creativity, and imagination.

  1. Divide the group into small teams of 3–5 people each.
  2. Give each team an English starting sentence, such as “Once upon a time, in a land far, far away…”
  3. Set a time limit, such as five minutes.
  4. Each team member must take turns adding one sentence to the story (in English), building from the previous sentence.
  5. After time is up, each team has a member read their team’s story to the class.
  6. Optional: The team that completes the most coherent story within the time limit wins. (This activity does not need to be competitive. It’s fun to hear all of the stories they come up with, whether there is a winning team or not.)

To make the activity more challenging, you can include a specific vocabulary theme for the story, such as “animals” or “travel”, or you can include a genre, such as “the story must be a scary story”.

Encourage the class to ask questions about the stories to the teams after they have heard each story.