Would They Lie to You?

What a treat joining Ms. Stefanova's ESL class the other day was! The 8th graders were doing the final presentations of a storytelling project they had been working on for a month. In teams of three, each of the students had to come up with an interesting story from personal experience. Next, they had to choose who among the team members would stick to telling their own story and which two people would swap stories and learn to tell the other person's story like it were their own. At the AV studio, down in the SCIFI lab, they filmed themselves telling their stories, editing them, too, and acquiring a new skill in the process. 

At the presentation stage, the other students in the audience asked questions, lots of questions, so they could make up their minds on who is telling the truth about having experienced the story first-hand and who was telling someone else's story as their own. The audience had to pay attention to all sorts of tell-tale signs: quickness of answer, authenticity, body language, everything. We were only there for the stories of Emma, Mina, Thea, Simon, Maria, and Yavor - but they all stuck with us. Maximum points for storytelling and maximum points for fun way to teach English (and a bunch of other skills, too)!