French Past Tense Writing Prompts | Passé Composé and Imparfait Stories

Help your students move beyond isolated sentences and write connected, logical stories in the French past tense!

In this Story Steps activity, students receive the beginning and ending of a story. They must write four intermediate events that logically connect the two prompts.

The ladder format helps students organize their ideas, develop cause-and-effect relationships, and practice writing with the passé composé and imparfait.

The open-ended prompts encourage creativity while giving students enough structure to prevent writer’s block. Students may also illustrate their stories in the spaces provided.

What’s included

• 100 two-page story-writing challenges
• 200 printable student prompt pages
• A starting event and ending event for each story
• Four spaces for students to develop the story
• Black-and-white illustrations
• Teacher instructions and extension ideas
• Mix-and-match pages for even more story combinations

Skills practiced

• Writing in the passé composé and imparfait
• Choosing between completed actions and background descriptions
• Sequencing events
• Expressing cause and effect
• Developing logical narratives
• Using transition words
• Building vocabulary
• Creative writing in the French past tense

Ideas for classroom use

• French 2, French 3, or intermediate French classes
• Past-tense writing practice
• Writing centers
• Partner or small-group activities
• Early-finisher work
• Sub plans
• Speaking and storytelling practice
• Review before an assessment
• Low-prep creative writing days

For an additional challenge, require students to include assigned vocabulary, transition words, adjectives, adverbs, or negative expressions. After writing, students can share their stories orally, compare the different paths classmates created, or discuss which sequence of events was the most logical or creative.

Because each story is open-ended, students can produce completely different narratives from the same prompts—making this resource easy to reuse with multiple classes.