Mad Libs

I have a fun writing exercise that I do with some of my more advanced classes. It was inspired by both Mad Libs...although is really quite different than Mad Libs. Yes, I want full credit for this genius idea.

Basically I write a sentence on the top of a piece of paper. i.e. "Jeremy met the girl of his dreams..." or "Brett joined the circus...." or "Jennifer had really big feet...".

In my classes I use all Vietnamese names except for my own name. I have enough pieces of paper for everyone in the class and tell the students they have thirty seconds to write the next sentence in the story. After thirty seconds I yell "switch" and everyone rotates their paper. The students then read the first two lines and then write the third. We do this over and over until everyone gets back their original paper. While the students are doing this I'm correcting the grammar (yes, it's still ironic to me, Mom, that I'm correcting grammar) and writing sentences on the board that we fix together as a class.

The students all like this game and then get to practice talking when they tell the class their story. Well, on my last day at school I did this with my Intermediate II class and got a great story. In case you can't read the picture above, here's the translation:

Ben died and went to heaven...
His girlfriend cried a lot.
After that, she had a new boyfriend immediately.
That guy was so handsome.
Especially the new boyfriend of Ben's girlfriend was much healtheir than Ben..
He loved her very much.
So Ben's ex girlfriend felt happier than when she fell in love with Ben.
One day she died and went to heaven too.
She met Ben there.
At first, Ben was so angry and complained her a lot.
Then he said he was healtheir than he was in the past.
After dying, Ben went to the gym everyday.
He had a nice body.
Another beautiful girl felt in love with him.