What happened here?

Objective & content

By the end, B1+ pupils can guess what happened before a scene and explain their guess, with must have, might have and can't have, the past continuous and the past perfect: The dog must have opened the cupboard. It was looking for food when the bag fell. The bank is 16 projectable slides: a how-to slide, then 15 surprising scenes (a kitchen covered in flour, a phone at the bottom of a pool, a trolley full of bananas in a park), each with a caption and five sentence starters.

Pedagogical guide

Use it as a five-minute warm-up that makes pupils think in the past. No scene has one right answer, so every guess counts as long as it fits the clues in the picture; the starters give the past modals and tenses, and the picture pushes pupils to give a reason. The slides are interchangeable: show one or two per lesson.

Suggested procedure

1. (1 min) Show the how-to slide and read the example together.
2. (2 min) Show one scene. Pupils look for a minute, then find two or three ideas in pairs.
3. (2 min) Pairs share their best idea. The class votes for the best story.

Adaptations

• [S] Give two possible stories and pupils choose the one the picture shows best.
• [A] Detective: one pupil decides what happened and the class finds it with yes/no questions; or pupils say what will happen next.

Materials & prerequisites

A projector or screen; the bank is a 16:9 PDF, one slide per page, with no printing needed. Assumes the past simple, the past continuous and must / might in the present.