I love using photos when teaching Present Continuous Tense. They provide a lot of opportunities to use the structure meaningfully. In this post I want to describe an activity for the online classes.
- Choose a painting with a lot of people and activities. ( I used ‘A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges-Pierre Seurat’ )
- Write a description for the painting with lots of Present Continuous Tense.
- Tell students to take notes while you’re describing the painting.
- Give them time to draw their pictures.
- Ask them to show their pictures and describe them briefly.
- Show the original picture when all finished describing their pictures and compare briefly.
I used the activity with prep classes. The students were 18+. They all participated eagerly, they wanted to show their pictures and talked about their work of art 🙂
Alternatively you can choose a photo instead of a painting and ask them to draw and upload their drawings on a Padlet wall with their brief descriptions and then you can show them the original photo.