Teaching vocabulary in a communicative way

When I have a long list of words to teach, students are never happy. The words are usually connected semantically, they belong to the same area, which of course is helpful. The problem starts when the students have to use the new words in sentences and remember their pronunciation, spelling and meaning in their mother tongue.

Last week I came up with an idea how to make the teaching process more productive and interesting to the students. After We had to read the text in the student's book and the students had the new words written in their notebooks, I asked them to choose five words of the list.
First, we played Bingo.

Then, I asked one of the students to come to the board and write down the words he had chosen in a column. He did. Two other students did the same. Now,I had three columns of words, 15 altogether, written on the board.
I asked them to choose one word from each column and to write a sentence, using these three words, of exactly 15 words. The fun started. This is a challenging task but the students did very well.
Then I asked them to choose 5 words, different to the three they had used, of the three columns and to write a sentence that is a continuation of the first sentence they had already had. The new sentence had to be 20-25 words long.
The final part of the task is to finish the story by adding one last sentence without any obligatory words to be included in it.
We all enjoyed the activity!

(Pictures source: http://www.learn-portuguese-now.com/portuguese-vocabulary.html; http://www.teachhub.com/teaching-strategies-vocabulary-expansion)