Yesterday's news

A group writing activity where the students have to plan an article detailing a dramatic
event.
- write a newspaper report on a past event.
- get some ideas from the class, use famous disaster movies for inspiration.
- a few simple examples:
Volcanic eruption
Bank robbery
Escaped zoo animals
Alien invasion

Try to elicit the kind of information that they'll need to write the article. Write questions
on the board that you want the report to answer. The following should be sufficient:

What was happening before the event?

What were people doing?
What happened?
How did it begin?
What was happening during the event? - People's reaction
How did it end?
What was happening after?

Confirm that students understand each of the above questions, and elicit which tense
should be used to answer them.
When all groups are clear on the writing task, they can start to plan and write their articles.
Remind them that their reports should attempt to answer all of the questions from the
board.
The editor's room
A follow-on activity where the groups review each other's work.
For this activity, the groups will now swap books and analyse each other's work. Tell them
that they should look for the answers to the questions from the board, and follow up with
each group to see what they found. They should also correct mistakes in grammar and
spelling.