Eva Buyuksimkesyan efl, ELL, elt, handouts, tenses

Tense Review

“Time is the longest distance between two places.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

I’ve been doing some creative writing workshops with a group of young learners. They love writing stories, poems but they still have problems with the tenses so today we revised them. As they love writing and hate drill-like exercises, I prepared a handout and had some fun guessing what people around the world are doing while we were revising the tenses. The handout may give you an idea and you can customise it according to your students’ needs and level.
You can download the handout.
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Eva Buyuksimkesyan fun, fun activities, future tense, games, ice-breakers, ideas, lesson idea, lesson ideas, lessons for teachers, narrative tenses, narratives, past continuous, past simple, past tenses, poems, realative clauses, revision

Revisiting Grammar

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May is round the corner. This means another school is about to end. Here you can find some revision games and activities that you’d like to use.

When I’m 65 (to revise tenses, time clauses)

Team your students

Prepare small cards, on small cards write random numbers such as 18, 22, 56, 38, etc.

Put the cards upside down on the desk

Tell students, take one card and make a sentence.

  • When I’m 65, I’ll probably have grandchildren.
  • When I was 18, I was a student at university.

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I had a great holiday there (to revise tenses)

Put some postcards or photos of places on the walls and tell students to walk around and imagine they were on holiday. They have to concentrate on one picture and then go back to their seats and write a paragraph, how they spent their holiday there. Then they can read and their friends try to guess which picture he has chosen.

I’m poem (to revise participles, relative clauses)

Ask them who they are. They will probably laugh and tell their names but tell them what roles do they have as a person in different places. Tell them that you’re their teacher, a mother, a wife, a friend, a colleague and although you are the same person but for your different roles, you have different responsibilities, feelings, emotions. Ask them if they are the same person as a sister, cousin, grandchild etc. Then give them the skeleton and ask them to write a poem describing who they are for different people and how they feel and react.

  • I’m the girl who loves reading books
  • I’m the sister watching you grow up
Eva Buyuksimkesyan activities, creative tasks, creative writing, creativity, descriptions, fun activities, grammar, grammar games, guided visualisation, lesson ideas, narratives, past continuous, past simple, past tenses, story writing, web 2.0 tools, writing, writing a paragraph, writing games

Getting Ready to Write A Story

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Level: All

Age: All

Target Language : Narrative Tenses, Adjectives to describe emotions, feelings, etc.                               

Give each student a handout with the chart below.

Play the sound effects you chose

Ask the students to fill in the following chart

What do you see?  
What do you hear?  
What do you feel?  
What do you taste?  
What do you smell?  

When your students finish completing their charts, ask them to share with their friends.

Remind them how we can start to write a first paragraph of a story. ( how we set the scene, etc)

Optional: you can ask your students to draw the scene based on their chart.

Then tell students to write an introduction paragraph for a short story or a novel.

You can download free sound effects

http://www.freesoundeffects.com/free-sounds/weather-sounds-10038/

http://www.soundsnap.com/browse

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Eva Buyuksimkesyan chain stories, conditionals, efl, fun, gamification, grammar

Chain Story Tweets

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My 9th graders are difficult to teach, they are not motivated but whenever I want them to play a game, they become very eager. They are very competitive and even the weakest of them, try to do their bests to win a point for their teams so we play lots of games.Sometimes I adapt drill-like activities to games or interesting activities.

We were revising If Clauses and I decided to do it as tweets. I explained them how we write chain stories. Then put them in groups, gave them poster size paper and three sentences that they could start their story. They really enjoyed working in the groups and the 8th lesson of a very long day needed happily.

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Another Twitter inspired activity 

More Conditional Activities

 

Eva Buyuksimkesyan activities, Conditional Sentences, efl, esl, fun, games, grammar, If Clauses

Fun Activities with Conditionals

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1. Writing chain stories or even writing chain poems.

If you decide to do the chain poem writing activity, then give them a skeleton

If I drink coffee,

I’ll stay awake tonight

If I stay awake tonight,

I’ll fall asleep in the morning.

And if I fall asleep in the morning,

My teacher will be very angry.

 

2. Go and Open the Door

This activity was taken from Creative Poetry Writing by Jane Spiro.

3. Prepare conversation cards or even prepare conversation cards on PowerPoint or Google presentation.

4. Prepare 2 different sets of cards. You can use two different colours. One colour for If Clause, one colour for the result clause.

Divide the class into two and play tic-tac-toe or put them in groups and tell them the first group who matches the halves will be the winner.

5. Songs are great for teaching or revising conditionals.

My favorites are:

  • If I were a boy (Beyonce)
  • If I had a Million Dollars (the BarenakedLadies)
  • Smile (Charlie Chaplin)
  • Time After Time (Cyndi Lauper)
  • Hero (Enrique Iglasias)
  • Count on me (Bruno Mars)
  • California Dreaming (The mamas and Papas) 

6. A great list of fun activities on TEF.net http://edition.tefl.net/ideas/grammar/activities-second-conditional/

7. Ask students to stand up and form a circle. Shout a half conditional sentence, throw the ball to a student and ask him to complete it.

8. Give students scrap paper, preferably used photocopies and tell them to write 5 half conditional sentences on. Then tell them to stand up and play snowball fights. Stop them when you think the fun is enough for them. Tell them to pick the closest snowball, go back to their seats and finish the sentences.

9. You can aslo find some fun activities here. 

10. Tell them to find out some superstitions from a different country and their own country and prepare a quiz or a poster.