Students will start by getting into pairs. ALT and JTE will pass out a sheet that explains the activity in English and Japanese. The instructions state that this is a Halloween Story Time activity. There will be a word bank with 15-20 different Halloween words and each student in their pair will have to pick 4-5 of the words for their partners to write a short Halloween story using the words their partner picked out for them.
The stories should be no shorter than 4 or 5 sentences and should have at least 35-50 words. Students will have 30-50 minutes to come up with a story and a couple of students will be called on to share their stories. Students should also underline the vocab words their partner chose for them. It may be helpful to come up with some pictures that show words that students might be less inclined to know.
This sort of activity can be applied to a wide range of holidays!
I have noticed that students are way more inclined to try and come up with a composition if they are able to sound ideas off their partners. If you want to make it more difficult only allow them to use a dictionary, no tablets or computers.
I'm also having students put their stories up in their classroom for other students to read until Halloween is over! You can have students vote on which one is best.