Learning grammar through stories

Voicethread provides teachers a great resource to develop many kinds of activities, involving audiovisual aids. I chose it to present a grammar point: the third conditional. Many students hear the word "grammar" and think of a fixed set of word forms and rules of usage. I have found that, when I teach a grammar point by presenting the forms and the rules, it results in bored students who can produce correct forms on exercises and tests, but make errors when they try to use the language in context. I designed this activity to work with my FCE students. In class, they watched and listened to the story I had prepared. As it is about part of my life, they felt interested in knowing more details about it, so I gave them the chance to ask me anything they would like to know (and I would like to share!) about it. I stopped it before showing the last image where the third conditional is finally presented. In that moment we analysed how to talk about consequences in the past due to actions in the past. Later, I showed them how to form a third conditional sentence and explained we can also use it to express regrets. Fianlly, they were asked to think of some moments of their own lives and use the third conditional to talk about "what would have happened if....". They said they wanted to create their own voicethreads, but we haven't seen any of their productions yet.