Past continuous games and activities | Teaching ESL Students

If you’re looking for some Past Continuous games, activities, worksheets and lesson plans, then you’re certainly in the right place.

Keep on watching for the best ideas, along with past simple vs past continuous teaching tips.

-------
• Check out this blog post for more details including activities, worksheets and lesson plans for this unit:
https://www.eslactivity.org/past-cont...

• Want some more Past Continuous - Teaching Ideas? Watch ‪@internationaltefltraining‬ video here:    • The Past Tenses - Past Continuous - T...  

• Join Jackie's email list:
https://eslspeaking.org/subscribe/

• Join this channel to get access to perks:
   / @jackiebolen  

• Find me on Patreon:
  / membership  

• Want a video on post-reading ESL activities? Watch my video here:    • The best post-reading ESL activities ...  
------
Check out my book 101 ESL Activities for Adults here:
https://amzn.to/3lAftup

  / eslspeaking  
https://www.pinterest.ca/eslspeaking/
  / jackie.bolen  
https://www.tiktok.com/@englishwithja...
#teachingenglishwithjackie #eslactivities #englishgrammar
--------------------------------------------------------
Transcript

Hi, this is Jackie. Today I'm going to talk about my favorite past continuous ESL activities. So what is the past continuous you might be asking yourself? If you need a little refresher, it's an action that began in the past and is still happening when another action occurred. For example, I was doing my homework when my mom told me that it was time for dinner. I was doing an action, but it got interrupted by another action. Here are some of the best past continuous activities.

The first one is what's everyone doing. Have a few students go outside the classroom. And then the students in the classroom, give them each a card with an action. For example, brushing my teeth, brushing my hair, going for a walk, eating ice cream, that kind of thing. One student can go up to the front of the class and then do the action and then get one student to come into the class. Once that happens, the rest of the class can make a sentence. Bob was brushing his hair when Jen came into the classroom. That's just a very simple introductory way to introduce the past continuous.

The second activity you can do is show some pictures of people getting interrupted doing something. This can make sentences. For example, the woman was on her phone when her child needed something. Something like that.

All right, the third one you can do is put students into groups of three. One student can choose a time in the past. The other two people can say what they were doing at that time in the past. So for example, seven o'clock the previous night. One person might say, I was eating dinner. The other person might say I was doing homework and the third person can make a sentence. Jen was eating dinner while Bob was doing his homework.

The fourth activity you can do is concentration. Choose actions that are closely related. For example, riding a bike and fell off the bike, something like that. Students have to find the matching card and then when they find fell off bike, riding bike, they could say, the boy was riding his bike when he fell off. They have to make a past continuous sentence.

The fifth activity you can do is charades or Pictionary. Make some sentences that use the past continuous. Put students into two teams and the one student from the first team takes a slip of paper and charades. they have to act it out. Pictionary, they have to draw it. So they have to draw or act out what is on that sentence or on that piece of paper and then their teammates have to guess what it is. And then the other team can go. They act out or they draw it and their team guesses what it is. Okay, so that is it for my past continuous activities. If you have any ideas, please leave a comment and share your ideas for teaching this as well and be sure to check out my book 101 ESL Activities for Adults.

Timestamp for past continuous games:
0:00 Intro
0:10 What is the past continuous?
0:35 What's everyone doing?
1:13 Show pictures of people
being interrupted
1:30 Group past continuous
1:56 Concentration
2:22 Charades or Pictionary
2:49 Outro

Tags: Past continuous, past continuous game, past continuous game, worksheets past continuous, past continuous activity, past progressive activities, practice past continuous, simple past games, simple past, simple past activities, teaching ESL activities, teaching ESL games, games for ESL, activities for ESL