Teaching Strategies
Verb Stories
How to use a Verb Story to Practise Verbs and Reduce Mistakes
The teacher tells a story and as the teacher talks she writes the verbs on the whiteboard, each verb on a new line.
The students retell the story, using the verbs as prompts.
They can then write the story and compare their version with the original.
In this way a skills flow is used - the students listen, then speak, then
write and lastly they compare and notice the language differences.
Benefits of Verb Stories
They help students to:
- focus when listening;
- notice and use correct verb forms;
- retell with appropriate scaffolding (the students hear the same story
more than once and they use the verbs as prompts).
When the students have retold the story once or twice orally each students
writes the story. There should be no verb mistakes.
Example of Verb Story
