Why should every language teacher tell stories? Creating stories is at the heart of TPRS, one of the best known CI activities. Story Listening, another CI activity, also evolves around telling stories.

Mario Rinvolucri explains that telling stories, one of the most meaningful and ancient activities in history, is so valuable in the language classroom because it appeals to emotions. "You can't seperate out the cognitive because the cognitive is part of the emotions". Stories without complicated language, but with deep, human emotions. Themes for stories? He likes to get them from the students or, as he says: something that finds me first.

This makes me think about Card Talk. Also The Motivated Classroom podcast mentions card talk. It is a simple activity that allows you to get to know your students quickly, talk about it in comprehensible target language and then use that information as ingredients for stories. Every student has a mini whiteboard on which they draw the answer to your question. That could be: what's your favourite animal? Which musical instrument do you like? What do you like to eat for breakfast? Which sport interests you? You can think of endless examples here. Then you look at their drawings and tell the class what you see: : Hey Paul, that's a nice dog. Do you have a dog? What's your dog's name? Is your dog small or big? How old is your dog? etc. 
Now you know what your students are interested in and you can make / tell stories including these interests. 

"If you touch one of those themes, it's very hard for a normal human being not to be involved", according to Mario Rinvolucri.