Five-Minute Activities for Young Learners

Box 90
Natural disasters: sentence stems
I saw a ... (Natural disaster) on TV ... (When?)
It was in ... (Where?)
The people had to ... (What did they do?)
There was / There were ... (Write one sentence about the buildings,
animals or plants.)
Follow-up
• Ask the pairs of children to swap their recounts with another pair. Each
pair then reads through the work of their peers and makes suggestions
about vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, or other ideas to add. The
children return their work to the original owners, who edit their draft
and prepare their recounts for display in the classroom.
• This activity would work better if you were able to give the children a few
days’ warning, so that they could pay special attention to news items on
television.
• For other factual recounts, see Activities 1.17, 5.14.