This is a follow-up to an earlier lesson we did with the sentence pattern chart. If you haven’t viewed that activity look at it now: this one will make much more sense. https://www.richardsilberg.com/new-page-37

This time students were given story cards, which we have used for many activities (you can find a link to the story cards I use in the resource section). They then created sentences that followed the sentence pattern chart. I added another category at the end of the sentence—a clause that begins with “because”. So we have : Article, Adjective, Noun, Verb, Adverb, Prepositional Phrase, Because.

One example from the video that follows this pattern is:

“The crowd of people are walking swiftly into the mosque because they are late.”

You can hear students read their sentences in the accompanying videos. They then created short improvisations based on the sentences. Unfortunately, I don’t have video examples of these scenes, but they were a good follow-up to reinforce the sentence pattern and produce new language. The activity could easily be expanded into more writing or storytelling as desired. What I most like about this activity is how low resource it is…you can use any photo or illustration from textbooks or other materials you have on hand, and simplify or expand depending on your student’s level and your language goals. But, if you can, get a set of storytelling cards. They lend themselves quite well to so many activities.