Once students are fairly familiar with past tense, I bring this activity out to help them practice. If you're using the New Crown textbook, you can point to Emma's essay about her year in Japan. I've done this in Japanese classrooms, where the students often learn past tense at the end of their first year in Junior High, but you can adapt it to other settings if necessary.
First, I write the four seasons on the board and make sure the students know what they mean. I fill in two sentences for each season with what I did over the last year. I try to mix in a lot of different verbs to give the students lots of examples and ideas. For example:
Summer
- I went to Nagoya.
- I ate lots of yakiniku.
After I've run through all the seasons and confirm that the students have the gist of what I wrote, I pass out the papers and ask them to write about what they did in their school year. I underline the past tense verbs on the blackboard and write a few more verbs to give more ideas, like "started" or "played" or "met." I ask them to write two sentences per season, but you can change that if needed. If they have extra time, you can have them share what they wrote with each other.