A group activity for teaching vocab

I just finished my first teaching session at ELI after 4 hours of observation. This is a reading class of 15 students, under the direction of Nancy Baum, at proficiency level 5 (out of 6 -- the highest). I've learned quite a bit from Nancy, in terms of her teaching style as well as class management. I can tell from the students that she is a well-liked teacher.

The activity I would like to share with you is about learning vocab in an ELI class. They use a book named Improving Vocabulary Skills as part of the curriculum to perform vacab drills. This is an excellent book, strongly recommended by Nancy. Basically the book uses tons of examples and blank-filling exercises to help readers internalize the new words, about 10 per chapter. I know most of L2 learners are struggling with this issue, so I'm quite intrigued to explore ways to provide new learning experiences. At the end of each chapter, the book has a section called Final Check which is an article composed of sentences with all 10 news words embedded but leaves them as blanks for students to fill in. Basically I adopted the same idea but went one step further -- I'd like students practice collaborative writing by putting together an article themselves. So, this is the activity: I divided 14 students in the class into 3 groups, and each group is responsible for composing an article entitled My Experience at the ELI. In average, each student is responsible for writing 2 sentences based on 2 different new words, and each sentence has to be subjective, using personal nouns such as I, me, myself, mine, etc. At the end of the given time -- 6 minutes, they can make modifications so that all sentences would fit together well. To illustrate my instruction, I gave them a story which I composed, and read it back to them in a way that new words get emphasized. At the end of the activity, all groups take turns in presenting the short articles, and authors are required to read their own sentences to the entire class. The result was quite positive as far as I can tell and students’ interest-level seems to be high.

My thought behind this activity was that if L2 learners make the new word subjective in writing, it would be easier for them to internalize how the word gets used. Furthermore, the teacher is able to integrate reading (vocab), writing, listening, and speaking -- the four strains of skills -- in a single activity.

How do you think? I'd like your comments on it and ideas to make it better, hopefully this activity would be a step in the right direction in making learning vocab more enjoyable for L2 speakers.