The journey continues...and I am continuing to love it as my students continue to have great success learning new structures and producing grammatically correct past narration! Woohoo!
We followed up our focused study of -AR regular preterite verbs, using the "La muchacha y la ardilla" story, with a focused study of -ER and -IR regular preterite verbs. We used the story "La madre de Jasón" (Download the script here--it was written by one of my students--of course). Our target structures were "s/he returned early", "they had fun", and "s/he met a young person"--all -er and -ir verbs. After we finished storytelling and activities, I gave them preterite notes, did some activities, and then came back to the story to do some horizontal conjugation. We finished it up with a communicative activity that led to fun discussion!!
PS - It was SO tempting to use the song "La madre de José" by El Canto del Loco in this unit, but...it's just a little too inappropriate for my students. RATS! It was the #1 hit while I was in Spain back in the day!!