The Best Medicine
A psychic in Bangor, Maine loses her car keys in a lightening storm. A park ranger wears a fedora at Venice Beach during a cold snap. A couple on vacation in the South Pacific sips from a tea kettle, witnesses a tsunami, and relocates their home from Tallahassee, Florida to Des Moines, Iowa. These are some of the silly stories my ESOL class came up with in our continuing theme of storytelling. I devised a kind of card game to spark their imagination based on a method of prompts one of my college writing professors used to use. I wrote occupations, cities, objects, and weather conditions on individual index cards, then had the students select one of each from face-down piles. Their task was to incorporate all four selections into an oral story. Our task as the audience was to guess what their selections were. The main object of the game is to incorporate the odd items as smoothly as possible, so guessing them would be difficult. I had hoped this would force my students to stretch ...