A compelling photo can tell a story and can be leveraged into a context for a conversation. Start by eliciting vocabulary from the students, then you can use that vocabulary to talk about the picture. You will finish by constructing a text together with your students, which you will ask them to read.

Picture Talk is a strategy from teaching with Comprehensible Input (CI). The difference between the way that the CI camp uses it and the way I am showing you below is that the CI version often asks students to invent a story looking at the image. You can do that too. What I am going to lead you through is how to use an image for the teacher to tell the student factual information using comprehensible (accessible) target language. I prefer this to storytelling because I like to give my students information about francophone culture, leading them to greater cultural competency.

Choose an image. There are five compelling images to choose from in this presentation. 

Write single vocabulary words as a list on the board. You and your students will come up with the vocabulary that suits their level. Ask students to look carefully at the picture. Students will describe the image as you write. As you are speaking with your students, ask questions to guide them to bring out different details in the picture. Keep adding to the list on the board.

Tell the story of the photo. Once the students have said everything they can about the image and there is a robust list of vocabulary on the board, the teacher uses those same words to talk about the image, giving students the background that they might not know. I have provided information that might not be readily apparent from the photo for you to use to develop the context.

Write a text and then read it. Get extra mileage out of the conversation by moving on to a Write and Discuss to conclude the lesson. If you haven’t done one before, this activity starts with asking students to summarize the conversation you had together. As they do, you write on the board (sentence by sentence) what they say. At the end you have a text that the class can then read.