Possible context: Students between 14-17 years old.
Aim: Learning the use of the past simple, the rules and how to build sentences with
it.
What students will need to know about the Past Simple tense includes:
Irregular forms,
Spelling of regular forms
Use of the auxiliary “did” in
question formation, negatives and short answer.
Activities to carry out in the classroom:
As teachers we can do interesting activities to teach teenagers the simple past
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.
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 someone’s 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 isn’t 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.
Past tense mistakes
In groups, have
students write past tense sentences about anything they want on separate pieces
of paper - but they have to make a mistake when writing the verb (most Students
will really enjoy being allowed to make a mistake on purpose!). For example,
"Last week I eated curry for breakfast everyday" (Encourage crazy
situations to make it fun). After writing some sentences on different pieces of
paper have the Students swap papers with other groups and make corrections.
Yesterday I went to…
This is a
chain game, like the game "I went to the market and bought ___". T
sits in a circle with the Students. The T starts by saying "Yesterday, I
went to the supermarket and bought some bread". Then Student 2 will have
to repeat that sentence and add his/her own, e.g. "Yesterday, I went to
the supermarket and bought some bread, then I went to the movie theater and
watched a movie". Then Student 3 repeats these two sentences and add
his/her own e.g. "Yesterday, I went to the supermarket and bought some
bread, then I went to the movie theater and watched a movie, then I went to a
cafe and drank a Coke",etc. If a student forgets something he/she sits out
that round.
Yesterday Time Guess
12 small
squares of paper write down key hourly times (e.g. 6am, 7am, 12pm, 4pm, 6 pm,
etc.). Also include a few "wild cards" with a question mark written
on them. Fold the squares of paper and put into a small box. Students sit
around the box and take turns on taking out a piece of paper. They have to make
a sentence based on what they did yesterday using the structure,
"Yesterday, I was ___ing at ___ o'clock" (E.g. Yesterday, I was
sleeping at 6 o'clock in the morning, Yesterday, I was eating dinner at 6
o'clock in the evening, etc.). If a student picks a wild card they can make a
sentence about any time of the day. If the student makes a perfect sentence
they keep the piece of paper, if not it goes back into the box. The person with
the most pieces of paper at the end is the winner.
References:
Ideas,
descriptions and exercises were taken from:
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