Digging deep

While browsing for something else on Pinterest yesterday, I came across this idea for extending independent writing.  Like many things that I find, it's not MFL-specific, but is an idea that can be readily adapted.

My Year 6 Spaniards have been working on my En mi pueblo unit since September.  Over the last couple of weeks we have been making sentences using one of the persons of the verb ir, a place in town and a transport, for example Va al mercado en coche.  Last week I introduced the notion of putting names in front of the verb forms to add more detail (in particular to overcome the ambiguity of va).  The final part of this unit, before we move on to Then and Now, is a piece of independent writing to show who goes where and how.  They are getting good at adding negatives, connectives and opinions, but I also want them to bring in other language that they learned in Year 3, Year 4 and Year 5 to extend and enrich their writing, and I am going to use the Pinterest idea to model it for them.

I made this worksheet completely from scratch in Publisher.  Here it is in that format for if you would like to adapt it, and the PDF version:

The PDF will appear in time on MFL Sunderland.  The idea is that you use the the different spades to help you to dig deeper in different ways, or a combination of all three to dig really deep and write a really good sentence.

In the past, mainly with GCSE students, I have had competitions to write the longest sentence, given a short starter, and have also played sentence tennis, where students take it in turns to say a word to build up a sentence until one of them gets stuck and can't add another word.  I'd be interested to hear your ways of getting students to dig deep.