Mohsen Mohsen Ali Mosaeid

Mohsen Mohsen Ali Mosaeid

15 fun activities for Present

Simple/Present Continuous
The best way of teaching the present tenses is to compare and contrast
them. These ideas will show you how to do the even more difficult task of
combining them in practice activities, all of them done in simple and
entertaining ways.
Written by Alex Case for TEFL.net

There are many well-known and fun activities for the Present Continuous,
such as ones involving miming and ones using pictures of crowded street
scenes. There are also quite a few things you can find in photocopiable
activity books for the Present Simple, such as timetables where students
have to fill the gaps in by asking each other questions. However, by far the
easiest and clearest way of showing the meanings and uses of the Present
Simple and Present Continuous tenses is to contrast them. Perhaps the main
reason why this approach isnt used more in the classroom is that it can be
difficult to find speaking and writing activities with a natural mix of the two
tenses. These activities aim to do away with that lack once and for all!
1. Mimes plus
Give students a list of Present Continuous sentences that they can mime to
their partners for them to guess, e.g. You are eating bread and jam. You
can add the Present Simple to this by choosing actions that some people do
every day (e.g. You are eating spicy food and You are blowing your
nose) and asking them to go on to discuss how often they do those things
and why. This is more interesting if it is a topic that is linked to cultural
differences, e.g. table manners.
2. Mimes plus Two
Another way of combining Present Continuous mimes with the Present
Simple is to ask students to mime actions that they do in their real lives
(perhaps choosing from a list with sentences like You are taking a
shower). The people watching the mimes have to make a Present
Continuous sentence to describe the action and also make a true Present
Simple sentence about the person miming and that action (e.g. You take a
shower every morning or You sometimes take a shower but you usually
take a bath).

Mohsen Mohsen Ali Mosaeid

3. Definitions game
Give students a list of words and ask them to choose one and describe it
with just sentences using the Present Simple and Preset Continuous. For
example, if the word is breathe they could say I do this many many
times every day and Everyone in the world is doing this now except some
divers.
4. 20 questions
With the same list of words as in Definitions Game above, students ask
each other Present Simple and Present Continuous Yes/No questions until
they guess which of the words their partner chose. Possible questions
include Are you doing this now?, Is anyone in this class doing this
now?, Are many people in this city doing this now?, Do you do this
every day? and Do you do this more than twice a week?
5. Postcards
Ask students to imagine that they are writing a postcard while they are
sitting on the balcony of their hotel room, on the beach or outside a caf.
They should naturally use the Present Continuous to describe what is
happening at the moment they are writing (e.g. The sun is shining or
The children are playing beach volleyball) and the Present Simple for
their daily routine while on holiday (e.g. I spend most of the day next to
the swimming pool or I have breakfast in the same caf every morning),
but you could also specifically ask them to stick to those tenses.
Alternatively, you could give them sentence stems that should get them
using those two tenses, e.g. All around me or In the evenings You
can then get students to read other peoples postcards with a task to do as
they are reading, for example to guess which place the person writing was
supposed to be in or to choose the best holiday.
6. Chain postcards
Especially if you have prepared sentence stems for the start of each line of
the postcard, you can combine the ideas in Postcards above with the
famously fun game Chain Writing (= Consequences). Each person fills in
the first line of a postcard, e.g. completing I am writing to you from
with the best holiday resort ever or the hills of Tuscany. They
fold over the paper so that the next person cant see what they have written
and pass it to the next person for them to continue the postcard. They
continue writing and passing until the postcards are finished, then they are
passed one last time and opened for general hilarity and a discussion about

Mohsen Mohsen Ali Mosaeid

which postcards make most sense, sound like the best holiday and/or are
funniest.
7. Present Simple and Continuous taboo topics
The strange thing about the use of the Present Continuous to talk about the
present is that we actually rarely use it in conversation, and least of all to
ask typical textbook questions like What are you wearing? In fact,
questions like What kind of underwear are you wearing? are basically
taboo. We can take advantage of this by giving a list of such taboo Present
Continuous questions mixed up with similarly taboo Present Simple
questions like How often do you shave your armpits? If we sprinkle in a
few more typical and harmless questions such as What time do you
usually get up?, we can ask students to rank the questions from 5 points
(taboo) to 1 point (easy to answer), then decide on which ranking of
question they want to be asked. How many points they actually get depends
on how well they answer the question. For example, if they ask for a four
point question (usually uncomfortable to answer but not really taboo) and
kind of answer it but with lots of pausing and some avoiding of the
question, their partners can decide to reward them with two points (half the
total of four points that they could have got).
8. Ask and tell
Students make Present Continuous and Present Simple questions, then flip a
coin to see whether they will have to answer the question themselves (tails
= tell) or be allowed to ask the question to someone else (heads = ask). This
is more fun than it sounds because many present tense questions are quite
personal and the person who has made the question will often be dismayed
by having to answer their own question. You can make this more risqu and
add vocabulary by suggesting words and expressions that they can or must
include in their questions, e.g. snore and itchy. Alternatively, they
could roll a dice to decide which tense they should use in their questions
(e.g. Present Simple if they throw a one, two or three), or the topic they
should ask about (e.g. families if they throw a one).
9. Time zones
If you give students a list of countries in different time zones, they should
be able to make sentences about what is probably happening there right
now, as well as their impressions of what daily life is like, e.g. People are
probably coming home from bars about now. I think they often stay up until
very late but sleep after lunch to describe their picture of Spanish life.
Their partners should listen and guess the country.

Mohsen Mohsen Ali Mosaeid

10. Guess the person
You can also get the students to describe and guess different kinds of
people from what they are (probably) doing now and their routines, e.g.
your mother-in-law from She texts my husband several times a day and
At this time she is probably doing a flower arrangement class.
11. Describe a photo
Perhaps the most natural situation in which to use a mix of the two tenses is
to describe a photo containing people that you know, for example The
person standing next to my brother is his girlfriend. She lives in Canada, so
they only meet a few times a year.
12. Tour guides
A group of people who probably use the two tenses together more than the
rest of us is tour guides, for example to explain what is happening in a
painting and how many people come to see it every day. The same
language is fairly natural to describe Tower Bridge opening, Big Ben
striking twelve, and a herd of wildebeest running across the plains. You can
use this situation by asking students to guess the tourist site from the
descriptions and then make up their own descriptions for other people to
guess from, or with roleplays in which the people on the tour keep on
asking more and more questions.
13. Test your classmates
Students test each other on the present dress and actions and routines of
their classmates with questions like What is George wearing on his feet?
and Does Ronaldo often wear glasses? Students will need to have their
eyes closed when they are being tested, and they might need to check some
of the answers with the person who the question is about.
14. Sentence completion
Give students incomplete sentences for them to complete to give true
personal information, e.g. I am feeling __________, I often feel
__________, I rarely __________ and My brother is __________. Students
read out just the part they have filled in (e.g. cook or hungover) and
their partners guess which sentence they put those words in.
15. Discussion questions
You can easily make discussion questions with the Present Simple and
Present Continuous, e.g. What things are getting better in your country?

Mohsen Mohsen Ali Mosaeid

and Do people in your country pay attention to government campaigns?
Why/why not? You can also use both tenses for sentences that students
should agree or disagree with, e.g. People buy brands because they think
they are better quality and People are slowly becoming more ecologically
friendly in their lifestyles. Alternatively, you can give questions which
arent written in those tenses but should elicit answers that are, e.g.
Describe the changes in the economy of your country at the moment.

Fun Practice For The Simple Past

Drilling games and communicative activities for intensive practice of the
Past Simple
Written by Alex Case for TEFL.net

The Simple Past is in many ways easier than the Present Simple, with no
third person S to worry about. Students can still need intensive practice,
especially to stop themselves from slipping into present tenses halfway
through a story and to be able to produce irregular forms quickly and with
good pronunciation. Some students might also need some help with
understanding and/or producing the pronunciations of ed endings.
Here are some ideas of how to do so:

Storytelling
We often use present tenses and other past tenses such as Past Continuous
to give our anecdotes a bit of colour, but it is perfectly possible to construct
a simple linear story with just the Simple Past. Perhaps the easiest way to
prompt storytelling is to give groups of students a set of cards to make a
story from, with each card being a word, phrase or picture. To practise the
regular and/or irregular verb forms, those cards could be verbs in the
infinitive.

Anecdotes
The most common thing to tell stories about is yourself. As people like
talking about themselves, anything on anecdotes tends to work well. The
challenge is to give the person listening a reason to do so. Things they
could do while listening include working out which anecdotes arent true,

Mohsen Mohsen Ali Mosaeid

asking as many questions as they can when the anecdote is finished, and
interrupting the anecdote as much as they can to ask questions. You can add
intensive practice of particular verbs by giving them ones they have to
include in their stories, especially if they are allowed to make some of the
stories up.
Video tasks for Simple Past
The obvious way of using a video for past tenses might seem to simply
describe what happened, but in fact this is difficult to do without using Past
Perfect and Past Continuous. One more controlled way of using a video is
to give them a list of verbs and ask them to put up their hands when they
think they can use one to describe what just happened. Another one is to
give them pairs of actions and ask them to predict the order, e.g. Mr Bean
bought some balloons and then snatched a bow and arrow, then watch and
check. Alternatively, you could ask them to make any true sentences about
what just happened in the video that they can, but only using irregular
verbs, verbs with a particular vowel sound, or verbs with a particular
pronunciation of the -ed ending.

What did the teacher do then?

You can do something similar to the video tasks above by doing a string of
actions and asking the students to say or write all the things you did. This
has most impact if you dont tell them what you are going to do but simply
start the lesson in an unusual way such as turning round twice and kicking
the bin. Do about ten more strange actions and then walk out the door.
When you come back in, ask them to say or write all the things you did.
They could then work in groups to write down sequences of strange actions
to do and test other groups with in the same way that you just did. As the
ultimate challenge, they could all do their lists of actions at the same time
and the people watching could also try to remember who did what action.

Who did what?

This is similar to the last idea above. Students are given some cards with
verbs or whole actions on (e.g. Jump or Jump next to the teachers desk
twice). Several students stand up and do their actions at the same time, and
the people sitting down have to say or write down who did what, plus in
what order if each student had more than one card.

Mohsen Mohsen Ali Mosaeid

Guess my life
Students can also do something similar with actions that they did outside
the classroom. In one version, students say an action they did yesterday or
this morning and the other students try to make true sentences including the
time, e.g. You brushed your teeth at 7:30. The person whose action it is
gives hints like No, much later until their partners get it exactly right.
You can also do it the other way round by one student giving the time and
the others trying to guess what they did at that time. You can also do
similar things with months and years, e.g. You lived in England in 2000.
Another possibility is to tell the story of someones day or life in order. In
groups of three or four, one person has his or her story told and corrects the
other people if they say something which isnt true. One person says You
got up and the next person continues with anything that happened soon
(but not necessarily just) after that, e.g. You made a cup of coffee. They
can continue that way through the whole day or stop whenever someone
makes a mistake and switch roles.

Fun drilling
As well as the communicative ideas above, it is well worth spending some
time on drilling the forms and pronunciation of the Simple Past. The easiest
way is to give them tables of irregular verbs and ask them to test each other
in pairs. A more fast-paced drilling game is Past Forms Tennis, where the
person serving does so with an infinitive and the person returning must do
so with the correct past form. With young learners you can even do this
with a real beach ball, making it more like Past Forms Volleyball.
An even more intensive game is Grammar Reversi. Prepare cards with the
infinitive on one side and the past on the other. Students have to guess the
form on the other side to be able to turn the card over and continue their
turn, either to play a whole game of Othello (as in the original game in the
book Grammar Games) or just to work their way along the entire length of
a set of these cards that have been put on the table in a row.
A more physically active game for the same language is Stations. Students
must react in one of two ways depending on what they hear, e.g. raise their
right hands if they hear a word whose past tense ends with /t/ or run and
touch the right hand wall if they hear or see a word whose past form has a
the same vowel sound as more.

Mohsen Mohsen Ali Mosaeid

15 fun Past Continuous activities

Amusing ways of giving students intensive practice of the Past Progressive
tense
Written by Alex Case for TEFL.net

1. Past Continuous Accusations

This is not only a classic activity for the Past Continuous, but also an all
time classic TEFL game. Students are given a list of strange actions and ask
their partners to come up with innocent reasons why they were doing those
things, e.g. When I saw you, you were painting over your windows. Why
were you doing that? I was turning my whole house into a big flag to
celebrate Independence Day. It is important that they say the When I saw
you part each time, to make the use of the Past Continuous realistic.

2. Past Continuous Alibi Game

This is another all time classic TEFL game. Students are divided into
suspects and alibis and they have to concoct a story of where they were
together at the time of the crime. They are then questioned separately, and
too many differences between their stories mean that the suspect is guilty.
You can make this more specific to Past Continuous by only allowing the
detectives to ask questions about the time of the murder, e.g. What were
you talking about? and Where was the waitress standing?
3. Green Card
A more romantic version of The Alibi Game is to get students to pretend to
be a couple and make up the story of when they first met. The other
students then question them separately on the details of that first moment,
e.g. what perfume she was wearing and who was standing near them.
4. Past Continuous Mimes
Students mime an action and when their partner is sure what it is they shout
Stop! They then guess the action with the sentence When I shouted stop,
you were + ing, e.g. When I shouted stop, you were polishing your
fingernails on your shirt to show how proud you are. It is important to use
the When I shouted stop part of the sentence each time to make this the
right tense, as otherwise You polished your fingernails is more natural.

Mohsen Mohsen Ali Mosaeid

5. Random pelmanism
Students take two cards at random and try to make a sentence including
those words or expressions with the Past Simple and Past Continuous. For
example, if they pick the words alligator and wallpaper, they could say
When I was covering my sons bedroom with teddy bear wallpaper, he
suddenly came in and said he wanted alligator patterns instead.
6. Past Continuous Things in common
Students try to find times when they were doing the exact same thing, e.g.
What were you doing at 7 oclock this morning? I was taking a shower
So was I! They cant use the same action more than once, e.g. only one
sentence about sleeping!
7. All kinds of actions
Put a list of actions on the board, e.g. tapping your fingers and
yawning. Ask students to do any of the actions in any order they like and
at some point shout Stop! The students then test each other on what their
classmates were doing at the time the teacher shouted stop with questions
like Who was polishing her fingernails? and What was Juan doing?
8. Past Continuous picture memory
Give students a picture that shows lots of people doing different actions,
e.g. a page from Wheres Wally? (=Wheres Waldo?) When they turn over
the picture so that they cant see it, test them on what people were doing
with questions like What was the old lady doing?, How many people
were smoking? and Who was standing next to the counter? You can
make the use of the Past Continuous more natural by using a picture with a
clock in or by making it a situation that people might really be asked these
questions about, e.g. the moment before a bank robbery.
9. Past Continuous memory challenge
Students try to ask each other What were you doing when you first/
last? questions that their partners cant remember the answer to, e.g.
What were you doing when you first tasted wine? or What were you
doing when you last saw a double-decker bus? You can also make this into
a bluff game by asking students who dont remember to make something
up, e.g. I was cleaning up after my parents birthday party or I was
flying low over London. Their partners then guess whether the answer is
true or not.

Mohsen Mohsen Ali Mosaeid

10. Past photos
Students pretend that a blank piece of paper is an important photo of theirs
and describe it to their partners. As it is just as natural to use the Present
Continuous to describe the actual actions in the picture, they should also
describe what they were doing when the photo was taken (e.g. having their
honeymoon), what people in the photo were doing at that time (e.g.
studying at university), what was happening outside the frame of the photo,
etc.
11. Continual nagging
Students take turns complaining that they did all the work to prepare for
something like a party or presentation, e.g. While I was making the
sandwiches you answered your mobile three or four times or While I was
cleaning the tables you were staring at pretty women out of the window.
The other person should also say they their action was more useful than it
seemed, e.g. Actually, I was waiting for the delivery van to arrive so that I
could bring the paper plates upstairs, or retaliate with a worse accusation
like While I was typing up the Powerpoint document, you were playing
poker on your computer.
12. Who was doing that?
Students make true sentences about what someone was doing when they
saw that person, and the other students guess who it was, e.g. He was
pulling across two lanes of traffic for a taxi driver or She was writing
something down in a notebook for a traffic warden.
13. Video task 1 When the screen went blank
While students are watching a video, the teacher suddenly presses the stop
button. Students have to describe what was happening in as much detail as
they can, and then check when the teacher presses play.
14. Video task 2 Detailed viewing
When students have finished watching a short clip, test them on things that
were happening in the background, e.g. What was the window cleaner
doing when the hero was taking out his walkie talkie?
15. Video task 3 Complicated cutting
Every time a character reappears on the screen, pause the video and test
students on what that person was doing last time we saw them.

Mohsen Mohsen Ali Mosaeid

15 top fun pronunciation games

1. Shadow reading Students try to speak at exactly the same speed and
rhythm as the CD, then try one more time with the sound turned down in
the middle of the recording to see if they are still in time when the sound is
turned back up. 2. Syllables snap Students take turns turning []
Written by Alex Case for TEFL.net

1. Shadow reading
Students try to speak at exactly the same speed and rhythm as the CD, then
try one more time with the sound turned down in the middle of the
recording to see if they are still in time when the sound is turned back up.
2. Syllables snap
Students take turns turning over cards with words written on them from
their packs. If the two words have the same number of syllables, the first
person to say Snap and/ or slap their hands down on the cards wins all the
cards that have been turned over so far. The person with most cards at the
end of the game is the winner. This also works with vowel sounds in one
syllable words and word stress.
3. Word stress pellmanism
Pellmanism (= pairs/ memory game) can be played with the same cards as
Snap, but is a slower game. All the cards are spread face down on the table
and students take turns trying to find matching pairs of cards by which
syllable is stressed. This is easier if all of the words have the same number
of syllables. This game can also be played with students matching by vowel
sounds or number of syllables.
4. The yes?! game
Students try to give as many different feelings and meanings to one word or
sentence as they can by varying the stress and intonation. The other
students guess what feeling they were trying to convey.
5. Yes. Yes! YES!
Similar to The Yes?! Game, students compete to say a word or sentence in
the most extreme way they can, e.g. they take turns being as angry as
possible and the angriest person wins.
6. Sounds brainstorming board race
Teams of students try to write as many words with the sound they have

Mohsen Mohsen Ali Mosaeid

been given on the board as quickly as possible. Each team member can only
write one word before they pass the pen onto someone else, but they can
prompt each other. This also works for number of syllables and word stress.
7. Minimal pairs stations
Students show which of two words they think they have heard by racing to
touch one of the things that the teacher or class decided will be used to
represent that thing, e.g. the table for /l/ or the chair for /r/. More active
classes can run and touch things like the door and the window, while shyer
classes can just raise their right and left hands.
8. Sounds same or different
In this variation on Minimal Pairs Stations, rather than indicating which
sound they hear, students indicate if they think two words you say have the
same or different pronunciation. This is good for homophones as well as
minimal pairs. The easiest way to explain the task is to give students pieces
of paper with Same and Different written on for them to hold up or
race to slap.
9. Sounds same or different pairwork
You can add lots more speaking practice, both controlled pron practice and
free conversation, to Sounds Same or Different by giving students
worksheets with the words you want them to compare highlighted on
Student A and Student B sheets. First they read out just the word to decide
if the pron is the same or not, then they read out their different sentences to
see if the context gives them any more clues. When they have finished, they
can spell the words out to each other and then look at each others sheets.
10. Tell me when Im odd
In this variation of Sounds Same or Different, students listen to a whole
string of words with the same sound (e.g. the same vowel sound) and race
to indicate the first word they hear that is different.
11. Silently mouthing
Students try to identify the word or sentence that the teacher or a student is
mouthing silently. This is good for awareness of mouth position for English
sounds.
12. Sounds puzzle
You can get the logical parts of their brain working during pronunciation
practice by hiding the sounds that make up a word that is the answer to the
puzzle. Students find the sounds in common in each pair of words, put all
the sounds together (mixed up or in order) and write the word they make.

Mohsen Mohsen Ali Mosaeid

13. Pronunciation maze
This game also allows them to use a little bit of logical problem solving to
help with a pronunciation task. In a grid, write a string of words with a
common sound, e.g. the same vowel sound, between the top left corner and
the bottom right corner. In all the other squares, write in words that people
might think have the same sound but dont. Students then have to get from
the starting point to the end by the right route. After they have finished,
drill the words on the right route, and then all the surrounding ones with
different sounds.
14. Common pron pictures
Students draw lines between the pairs of words that share the same sound
on their sheet, and see what kind of picture is made by those lines. This can
take a lot of preparation, but is easier if you just have the thing they draw as
a letter of the alphabet, usually an upper case one as there are more straight
lines.
15. No sounds listening comprehension
Students try to identify which sentence in a dialogue the teacher or a
student has chosen without them using any English sounds. This can be
done by waving your arms around to show sentence stress or intonation, or
beating out the rhythm on the sentence on the table or your palm.