What it is
Story Sparks is a visual prompt generator for ESL/EFL speaking and writing. One roll deals three picture cubes to the classroom screen (a thing, a place and an action) and the class has to tie all three together into a sentence, a description, or a short story.
Any cube can be locked before the next roll, so a teacher can keep the part that is working and replace the rest. That makes it easy to move from a single sentence to a longer narrative without ever losing the thread the class has already built.
Screenshots
Who it suits
Story Sparks works with any age group and any group size, from a pair to a whole class. There is no CEFR level to set: the images carry no language of their own, so beginners can name what they see while stronger students build a full narrative around the same three pictures.
Because a round takes as long as the teacher wants it to, it fits a two-minute warm-up just as well as a full writing task.
How classroom play works
The teacher opens Story Sparks on a shared classroom screen (a projector, interactive whiteboard or classroom display) and rolls. Students respond to the three images out loud or in writing, and the teacher locks or rerolls cubes to shape the next prompt. No individual student devices are needed. Where students do have screens, the student view gives them a live, read-only copy of the same three images.
Skill focus
Story Sparks targets spoken and written production rather than a single grammar point. The three-image constraint forces students to connect unrelated ideas, which is what produces the linking language, tenses and prepositions a story needs. Pairing it with a target structure — past simple for a finished story, present continuous for a description — turns the same prompts into focused grammar practice at whichever level the class is working at. See the CEFR guide for how levels are applied across Lingadoo games.