Invent a Story

Purpose: To give intermediate and advanced-level students practice with correct question formation and narrative forms.

Preparation Time: None.       

Materials: None.

Preparation: Based on your students’ skill level, you might need to plan on reviewing different types of yes/no questions and how they are formed. This could include questions using “do,” “have,” “be” and modals.

Procedure:

1. Tell the class or group they are allowed twelve yes/no questions and their task is to discover what your story is. In reality, you have no story, but the class doesn’t know it. Encourage students to help each other, since the questions need to be correctly formed in order to be answered.
2. Answer “no” to every third question and “yes” to all the others. Do not answer it at all if the question form is not correct. It’s important for the students to believe that they are truly discovering your story, so give the impression that you are thinking very hard as you answer the questions. 
3. After asking twelve correctly formed questions, the class has to construct a story from the answers you’ve given them. Avoid correcting the students at this point and address errors after the story is completed.
4. If you decide to explain what you did, you’ll need a different set of rules for how to answer the questions when you do the activity again.  

Variations:

• Answer “yes” to all questions using “do” or “have” and “no” to all questions using “be” or modals.