HOW TO WRITE A LOVE STORY in class

This activity can be used for Saint Valentine's Day with upper-graders. 

 If your students still confuse past tenses it will be great to have a warm-up on irregular verbs. Use a traditional lexical game Knots & Crosses for that.

 Devide your students into teams. Each team will have the task to write a Love Story. 

1. Stress the importance of several points before writing the story:

The names of the characters, the dates (They met on Sunday, they met in 1945, they met on June,3 in summer), the places (At the station, in the shop, in the internet, at school).

To make it a bit easier with grammar you can help them by writing on the board some verbs on the subject: met, fell in love, dated, went out, were thinking of each other, fell out, broke up, made up, got married etc.

A nice exercise for refreshing the Past Tenses - Fill in the gaps with the correct verb form:

—Jorge and Jane _____(meet) at the bus station, on April 10th, 1990. She _____ (be) waiting a bus to go to Santiago, when  Jorge _______ (arrive) beside her.

—He ____ (ask) her if she _____ (can) lend him her cell phone, but she ______(say) "no, I can’t”. He really ______ (need) to make a call, so he _____(try) to convince her by telling to Jane that she ______ (look) absolutely beautiful like a model.

—After that, Jane _____(lend) her cell phone to Jorge. She also ________ (think) he was very handsome. Then, Jorge ______(take) a bus and _______(disappear).

—She _____(be) thinking of him many days. She _______(decide) to phone to the same number he ___(do) that day trying to find him. However, Jorge _____(not) answer and she ______(hear) a happy female voice that said " Jorge (marry) today".

 2. Teams write their Love stories. The teacher can consult them at certain points.

 3. Students draw an illustration for their Love Story. After that they exchange their pictures. Each team has to reconstruct another team's story according to the illustration. This is working good for their speech skills.

 4. Teams read out their stories and check if the other team's guesses were right or wrong, comment on each other's work, correct their mistakes.

 This activity allows to get all students involved. The weaker ones can do the reading or illustration work. My experience showed that all students enjoyed writing love stories a lot, it encouraged them not only to train their English skills but also let them involve their personal experience on the matter.