How Teach Tenses Enjoyable Way

 

Teaching grammar is sometimes boring for both students and teachers as it is more syntactical. Here are some interesting activities which will help the teacher to practice the tenses extensively and enjoyably. Teacher can adapt the activities according to the classroom environment and the level of students. We found these activates are intrinsically enjoyable and the students will be fond of them.  

Activities to Practice Present Continuous and Present Simple

• Students can pretend to be police officers on surveillance duty - or spies - to practice the Present Continuous. They say what people are doing in sentences like: A man is walking into the shop. He’s carrying a bag, etc. Teacher can give a situation or picture cue according to the level of students.
• We can contrast people's work and holiday lives with the Present Simple and Continuous in sentences like: He usually gets up at six thirty, but it's ten o 'clock now and he’s lying in bed reading a book.
• We can get our students to listen to sounds and tell them to describe what they think is happening.
• We can talk about someone's daily routine to teach and practice the Present Simple. e.g. She gets up at six o 'clock. She goes to work by car, etc. Students can talk about their own lives and routines.
• We can also use mime games to practice the present continuous (Are you playing the guitar? Are you reading a book?).
• Horoscope reading can be fun as one student can be the Horoscope reader and tell others characteristics using Simple Present Tense. e.g. This person easily gets bored at studies and always gets sick…etc. 
• Students can draw a personality checklist in a table and do a survey in the classroom by questioning them using simple present tense at the end they can present the report to the classroom.  
• Find someone who… is an adaptable game for most of the tenses. Students can form a list of things like a person who like gardening as hobby and do a survey in the classroom using almost any tense.

 

Activities to Practice the Present Perfect

• To practice the Present Perfect Simple, the students can mime looking happy, exhausted, sad, amused, etc., and the other students have to ask them questions with just, such as Why are you sad? Have you just said goodbye to your girlfriend? etc.
  
• If we want to introduce the Present Perfect Continuous, we can how the students a series of pictures and they have to say what the people have been doing, for example: He’s been jogging, she’s been shopping, he's been taking an exam, she’s been giving a speech.
• Teacher can show a picture and ask students to predict what has happened earlier to see the present result. e.g. teacher can show a picture of a crime scene and ask students to be the detective and find clues on what has happened earlier.  

 

Activities to Practice the Future

• The students can pretend to go to a fortune teller and ask question such as Will I be rich? Will I get married? and one student can be the fortune teller and tell about their future.
• Students can speculate about what they are going to do at a time in the future, in sentences such as When I leave school I’m going to travel round the world.
• Students can make new Year's resolutions, saying what they are going to do and what they are not going to do in the next 12 months (I'm going to give up eating chocolate. I'm not going to stay up late every evening, etc.).

 

Activities to Practice the Past Simple

• We can tell stories with the Past Simple. For example, we can ask our students to describe their week (On Monday I went to the cinema. On Tuesday I had a coffee with my brother; etc.).
• Get students to build a cooperative story. After dividing the students into groups teacher can ask one student to write the first sentence of a story and hand it over to the other student – until they come to a resolution they can write the story using the Past Tense.
• Beginner students can be given cards with either the Base Form of a verb or its Past Tense Form. They have to find the student with the matching card (e.g. run – ran or go - went). They then make sentences with the past tense verb.

 

Activities to Practice The Past Continuous and The Past Simple

Many teachers (and students) enjoy playing the game 'ALIBI' to practice the Past Continuous and the past simple. The class imagines that a crime was committed at 10 pm last night. Four students go out of the room and agree on a story about what they were doing last night at this time. The students then come back into the class, one by one, and the other students question them by asking What were you doing at 10 o 'clock? What were you eating? what happened then? etc. The student whose story is different from the others (because he or she can't remember all the details) is the 'criminal'.

 

Activities to Practice The Past Perfect

• We can give our students a story which uses past simple and past perfect verb forms. They have to circle the verbs and then say which action happened first.

E.g.: When Shelley got home she realized that someone (or something) had been in her flat.

She was sure that she had locked the door that morning.

She noticed that someone had left muddy footprints on the carpet, etc.

• Drawing a story line is a great activity to make students aware of the tense. Students can be given sentences like above and ask them to mark them on a time line.

 

Most of these activities are found in one of the most interesting book we came across -Essential Teacher Knowledge by Jeremy Harmer.  It is a handy book for teachers which has answers for most problems encountered by teachers.

So, teachers please mention some interesting activities you utilize in the classroom to teach in the comment section that would be a wonderful experience to share your knowledge among each other. If you find this post useful to others, please share it with others using the social share button below.