Writing as another

1. Put the students into groups of 4 and then ask them to write individually a sentence about something they did in the past, for example as a child, during their last holiday, or even the previous weekend, e.g.: I visited friends, I wrote poetry etc.
2. Tell the students to pass their paper to another member of the group.
3. Each student reads the sentence passed to her/him and underneath writes 10 questions about it, e.g.: How long did you stay with your friends? Did you eat with them? etc.
4. Ask the students to pass the paper to another member of the group and she then responds to the questions, inventing the answers.
5. The 10 questions and answers are passed on a third time and the task is now to write a short passage using the information from the questions and answers.
6. Ask the students to pass the passage back to the writers of the original sentences. They read them and comment on how near the passage is to the original experience.