Elementary Speaking Lesson – Present Continuous – 40-60 minutes
Are you looking for a fun speaking lesson about present continuous? Me too. Here’s a lesson for reviewing present continuous in a fun communicative way with your child, teen, or adult classes.
So let’s get started!
What you’ll need:
| Before class starts, print and cut out these five sentences into separate strips. (You could also handwrite them onto scrap paper.) Then put them around the classroom. 1. I ___ running to the store. 2. Grandma ___ eating at a restaurant. 3. They ___ going swimming in the ocean. 4. My brother ____ studying Spanish today. 5. We ___ playing a game in class. You will also need two dice. These can be large or small. |
Optional:
| Toy hammers / fly swatters Verb Flashcards Verb images on a powerpoint slide |
Class time!
1. As a warm-up, quickly review “be” verbs with your students. Put the words “am,” “is,” and “are” on the board. Call students up, say a pronoun or noun, and let students smack the correct “be” verb. So if the teacher shouts “she,” then the students hit “is.” You can do this as a team activity and award points or you can just let students have fun competing with whoever they’re standing at the board with. This is more fun with fly swatters or toy hammers, but students don’t need a prop to do this. (5 minutes)
2. Now do a running dictation. Put students in pairs. Have one student write the numbers 1-5 on a piece of paper. The other student will be the “runner.” The runner will stand up, find a sentence, read it, remember it, and come back and tell the other student who will write it down. Tell students they need to do this quietly so other groups won’t hear the answers. The first group to finish is the winner. (10-15 minutes)
3. After a winner has been declared, have students dictate the sentences to you including the missing “be” verb. A student volunteer could also write the answers on the board if you want to make this more challenging. After writing the answers on the board, everyone should check their answers. Then have students put away their answers. (5 minutes)
4. Tell students to close their eyes. Erase a few key words from the sentences on the board. Students open their eyes. Choose someone to read all the sentences including the missing words. You can repeat this several times, erasing more and more words. (5-10 minutes)
5. Now write this on the board.
1. You
2. He
3. I
4. They
5. She
6. We
6. Split the class into two teams. Give a dice to someone on each team. Tell the students a verb. (You can either tell the students a verb, show them a verb flashcard, or use a PowerPoint to display GIFs of verbs.) Then say “Ready, Set, Go!” The students with the dice roll at the same time, they check their pronouns on the board, and say a present continuous sentence with the verb and pronoun. So if a student rolled 5 and the verb was “go skateboarding,” then that student would say, “She’s going skateboarding.” If the other student rolled a 1, then that student would shout, “You’re going skateboarding.”
For scoring, give students points according to what they’ve rolled. The person who spoke fastest gets an extra point for their team, so if Max rolled a three and Sandy rolled a 4, but Max said the answer first, Max would earn 4 points and Sandy would also earn 4 points.
Repeat this until everyone in the class has had at least one chance. (10-15 minutes)
7. Then count up the points and announce the winner. (5 minutes)
8. If there is time leftover, the teacher can roll the dice and the class as a whole can chant some present continuous sentences together. (5-10 minutes)
