Surprisingly, I've happened to use my projects in the classroom — it's quite attractive for the students to see some actual real-life materials along with the "been there, done that" stories as an addition to the book material and better than checking things on their own on the Internet. So from students' perspective this sole reason is enough for you, as a teacher, to collect some souvenirs from the countries you've been to.

The reason why I love "Mystery of the Abbey" as the beginning of the course is that it helps students to start speaking the language from the first moment and, unlike usual introductory activities, it makes them see that they can actually communicate well enough to achieve something: in this case to solve the mystery.

We've had fun with DixIt, with Once Upon a Time,  but at the moment my most favourite storytelling tool is called the Story Cubes. It may look like a simple set of dice with random pictures on them, but it's in fact a real vocabulary booster.