Struggling to come up with an idea to pull your A2s up into using past tenses?
You’re not alone! I, too, was looking for a way to get my students to move beyond short, mechanical sentences and actually use past tenses in meaningful contexts. That’s how Our Disaster Holiday was born — a fun, multi-layered activity that gets students reading, writing, and talking about their own (imaginary!) holiday mishaps while consolidating narrative skills and vocabulary.
Want to know how? Just keep reading 👇👇👇
After almost two weeks working through English File Unit 2A, my students brought the unit to a close with this fun (and slightly stressful!) storytelling project. It looks simple, but it actually brings together a wide range of skills — reading, writing, grammar, speaking, and interaction — in two coherent sequences.
✏️ How to Use
- Lead-in
Begin by revising past simple forms and typical holiday disasters (e.g. missed flights, wrong hotel, bad weather, lost luggage…).
Encourage a few quick oral examples: We lost our luggage. It rained every day. - Guided story (Story 1)
I stuck copies of two stories on the walls and encouraged students to read the first comic-style story and discuss their decisions matching the dialogues that the students had on a printout.
Match the dialogues to the images
3. After checking the dialogue, in small groups students filled in the story with the missing verbs in past simple.
➤ This reinforces tense control and narrative order without overloading them. Here below you have the activity, but you can download the sheet anyway.👇
4. Semi-guided story (Story 2)
Students look at the second set of pictures and invent their own dialogues.
Once each group had written their dialogues, I asked them to read out what they had written (and checked for errors).
5. The next step is to have students collaboratively write the second story, using the text from story 1 as a sample to model their writing on. 👇
Meanwhile, what was I doing? Well, I was on my two ‘little feet’, walking around, helping and giving tips to each group.
6. Once my students had finished writing their stories, they read them aloud (this is a good moment to check on those pesky -ed pronunciation problems 😎), and we all listened and enjoyed a wide variety of stories born from the same sequence of images.
7. Homework
On the same task sheet, my students have instructions to write their own story as homework. They also have instructions not to write their name; thus, during our next class, we will display their compositions on the classroom wall, and their classmates will have to read them and then ask questions in the past simple to find out who wrote the story (a great way to revise questions in the past simple).
What I learnt from this:
My students sweated and ended up a little dizzy – as they said – but they also told me that they felt that they were taking something very useful with them, which was that they felt a little more confident that they would be able to write this composition at home and, above all, that they had felt accompanied in this path towards writing their own text using the past simple. Now wasn’t that lovely!
Here you have the task sheet 😎