One of the great ways of engaging my students in using the language is to make them tell stories. Unfortunately, some of them are very shy. They don’t believe they can come up with a good story, so they even don’t want to try. That’s why I prepared a very simple sheet that helps them prepare their first crime story. They have to work out who the detective is, then decide what happened, who did it and why. When they know the crime they can decide what clues let the detective find out who the murderer/thief etc was. At the final stage, their task is to describe the situation in which the criminal was caught. Then, when they collected all the information, telling the story is much easier!
You can buy the original Story Cubes on Amazon:
Amazon (UK): https://amzn.to/2wCEAAk
Amazon (DE): https://amzn.to/2NLf4zb
You can download the pdf files to print them out for your students:
English: Detective story with Story Cubes EN