I love this. I've done it at every level, the sentences are sometimes a mess, the whole thing is hilarious, and it helps them with the following:
Critical thinking
Construction
Representation of language in less obvious ways
Slowing down to achieve comprehension
Associating mental images with language
Students begin in groups of five-ish. Four is fine, six is fine, more or fewer than that and we get unwieldy. I give them a list of vocabulary they're allowed to use - either recent vocab they need repeated or old vocab they need a no pressure refresher on. They're also allowed to have "is," "and," basic prepositions, and three words the class votes on (they're a pretty big fan of cow, for example). For each of those five freebie words, we determine a hand sign so that there's a standard across the board.
The groups get around 10 minutes to hammer out a five word-or-phrase story they want to tell. They are only allowed to use the words I gave them plus the freebie words. Phrases are KNOWN phrases or a single word+preposition. For example, we had learned "amazing to say" or "paralyzed by fear." These are word chunks the class had acquired as chunks. These are not whatever phrases the group can come up with. It must be five words/phrases because each kid in the group is going to get assigned one of those.
Each group then has to run their sentence by the teacher so teacher can make corrections as necessary. Alternately, you can simply provide and assign the sentences. I find mine are less funny, so I let my kids write them, but for some classes, it is better to write them yourself.
Group then practices signing their sentence. Each student signs their own word or phrase. The group should practice signing as slowly and clearly as possible. When you feel that the groups have got it, they all turn to the first group.
Those five kids stand up and organize themselves in order of their sentence. Slowly and clearly, they sign/gesticulate/act their sentence. This is usually hilarious. While they do this, the rest of the class watches and attempts to write down the sentence. The know what words they have available, so they're working on "reading" the sentence and recording it. The group performs three times unless they're asked to repeat it.
Select a few students to read what they thought the sentence/story was. This is also often funny. Finally, have the group 'perform' their story again but each kid says their word/chunk as they do their action, so ultimately the class hears and sees the sentence at the same time.
To recap:
Five kids come up with the sentence [the innkeeper] [paralyzed by fear] [has] [a sword] [under the bed].
They practice gesturing this.
They gesture it dramatically in front of the class three times. The kids watching attempt to figure out what is being signed, and they write it down.
The gesticulating group performs it again. Kid one performs [the innkeeper] while saying "the innkeeper," kid two performs [paralyzed by fear] while saying "paralyzed by fear," etc.
The better/more interesting the range of vocab, the better. You'll need verbs and nouns, and adjectives/adverbs/descriptive phrases help, too.
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