Activities for simple present & present progressive?

[teacherjuli]

Simple Present Tense & Present Progressive...

I would like to contrast these two tenses for my beginning ESL class. Does anyone know of any activities, games, songs, lessons, websites, etc. that address these individually or even better as a comparison?

Thanks for any suggestions!

Juliana

[keith]

Hi Juliana

Have a look here: http://www.eslbase.com/worksheets.asp (scroll down the page for some present simple and ocntinuous activities).

Hope this helps

Keith

[trubadour]

This is based on what I was doing with my more advanced elementry students. We are lucky in that the concept and content was introduced in the rather excelent 'Grammar One' by Jennifer Seidl (OUP), and the class is rather hard working.

Basically the book sets out someones diary of what they usually do on certain days of the week and then contrasts these with pictures of what they are actually doing on that day. So the sentence runs: 'Bobby usually does his homework on Fridays but today he's playing computer games.' Quite a long sentence, but its not too difficult, especially if you break it down and teach each part indiviually. We learnt unsually, sometimes, often etc beforehand; it is quite easy to teach using a graph/table/diary type illustration.

Then, to test their previous learning and practice this comaprison structure, we learnt the functions of various jobs (a doctor helps his patents, a baker makes cakes, a builder builds walls, Anna Kournikova plays tennis, Britney Spears sings songs..) and compared it to what they were doing today (perhaps their holiday - strange things as well as normal things - eating an alien's brain, going shopping (whatever you can make out of your flashcards)).

An easy and flexible way to set this up its to make a table on the board. Stick your professions/people/usual actions/present perfect down the x-axis and the things they are doing today along the y-axis. Draw lines between the pictures to make a chart. It is easy to drill the parts of the sentence as you construct the table in front of them. Then you can read off a few sentences as you tick or number the boxes to make the sentences. Then you can say - whats number one? and they can put the two together. You can practice this, have a competeiton, get them to write and illustrate the sentences, copy the chart, add their own, question and answer, play battleships, tetris, etc. Many possibilities.

I hope the above is clear enough.

[CraigPeterson]

I love using songs in class, so I created a website devoted entirely to it! Here's the link to a song that contrasts present simple and present continuous: http://eslsongsource.com/node/66

In the tips section there are many ways to use songs in your class, in case you're short on ideas. Good luck!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Craig Peterson
ESL Song Source - Find a Song For Your Class!
www.eslsongsource.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[catnfish]

I'm a university student majoring in English education, and I'll be an ESL teacher hopefully next year. Here I would like to share my experience with you.

1.to reinforce the sentence structure, you can let students practice like:

she has a .... in town

and let them fill in the blanks with words they've learnt or new words of the text.
eg. nice lawn. the most beautiful house ....etc.

and let them do pair work then give performance in front of the class.

2. associate with old tense.
let students practice by changing the tense.
eg. Listen, the bird is singing--> the bird sings

and I also have a question, how to do the presentation stage quite effectively? I found young kids are not so easy to concentrate, and present the tense structure is kinda boring to them...

does anybody happen to have good idea?

thanks a lot