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Watch a video and predict the ending, watch again and do the quiz, go over the grammar of the answers, then students write their own short story using those tenses and get them to read them out. Also, work out the meaning of these common phrases/words from the context. 

What, if any, could the moral of this story be?

Timeline of events: what happened first IN TIME? (man became addicted to drugs, man lost his son in custody battle,  man had a hard life and became homeless, boy went to the gym, missed the bus, waited at bus stop for an hour, man arrives....etc. Choose 2 points in the story, use different narrative tenses to talk about their position in time. Explain about the subtle differences in meaning. Give examples, and demonstrations/explanations, then get students to do the same. To make it more controlled, do one tense or one combination of tenses at a time (e.g.: past cont interrupted by past simple - write 2 sentences using these tenses). To make it more free for more advanced students, let them choose any tenses and any points in the timeline to talk about. 

Work out the meaning of these phrases from the context: peppering the ground, out of the corner of my eye, a shelter, there was something off about him, mumbling, to creep me out, I took another look. If needed, watch again with quiz mode OFF. 

Get students to write their own short horror story! It could be based around something scary that happened to them in their life, and/or provide a series of prompts (a time you got lost, a time you thought there was someone in the house, a time you had a supernatural experience...) Try to use all the tenses. You could get a small group of classmates to act out each other's stories, with one student as narrator.

Pre-teach: prescription drugs, custody battle.

Watch with quiz mode OFF. During watching - pause at different moments and get predictions about what might happen? Discuss afterwards. Then watch again with quiz mode ON. Use the quiz as a diagnostic tool for their comfort level with narrative tenses. 

A boy is waiting at a bus stop when a strange man approaches, acting in a way which scares the boy. He assumes the man is out to hurt him but in fact, the man is harmless and has had a hard life. The boy has made assumptions about him that are not true. 

Bus Stop Horror

bus-stop-horror

Let's do English ESL general grammar practice. Watch a video and predict the ending, watch again and do the quiz, go over the grammar of the answers, then stude…