The past simple

Objective & content

Everything to teach the past simple in one pack of four parts: slides to project, a three-level practice sheet, a team game and a 10-minute quiz with answers. The pack starts from a short story, Max's burnt birthday cake, in which pupils notice the past forms before they meet the rule. It then covers regular verbs and their spelling, twenty everyday irregular verbs, the negative with didn't, questions with Did ...? and short answers, and time words (yesterday, last week, two days ago, in 2020). By the end, pupils can say and write what people did, make negatives and questions, and place an action in time.

Pedagogical guide

The rule is given in Remember! boxes, not left to be deduced; the story and the pictures make the form easy to notice first. The practice sheet is one A4 sheet at three levels: every page has a Bronze, a Silver and a Gold task, so the whole class works on the same page and each pupil moves up when they finish. The game puts the same language under time pressure, in four rounds, and the quiz gives a mark out of 20. The pack stays at A2- level: only the twenty irregular verbs of the pack are used, and no present perfect, past continuous or modal verbs appear. The key page of the practice sheet holds the answers, teacher notes, six common mistakes (for example "She didn't went home") and the verb list. Spelling is British English.

Suggested procedure

The pack fits two lessons of about 45 minutes. Lesson 1 is Teach it and Practise it; lesson 2 is Play it and Check it. The four parts can also be used alone.

1. (25 min) Teach it (lesson.pdf, lesson 1): show the story and ask "What did Max do?", read the Remember! boxes, the spelling cards and the irregular verbs aloud, then do the six-question quick check with the class. The last slide is for the teacher and is not projected.
2. (20 min) Practise it (practice.pdf, lesson 1): give each pupil the three pages and a start (Bronze, Silver or Gold); correct page by page, with one pupil from each medal reading an answer.
3. (20 min) Play it (game.pdf, lesson 2): make teams, show each question, give 20 seconds to write the answer, then show the answer slide and keep the score. Round 4 is worth double points.
4. (10 min) Check it (quiz.pdf, lesson 2): pupils work alone on page 1; mark out of 20 with page 2.

Adaptations

[S] Start every pupil at Bronze and keep the Remember! slides on screen during the practice and the game. Accept a short answer in the game and do the quiz in two halves.

[A] Send fast pupils straight to Gold and then to the Gold writing task on page 3, where they read their weekend to a partner who asks one question. In the game, ask them to say each answer aloud in a full sentence.

Materials & prerequisites

A projector or screen for lesson.pdf and game.pdf (one PDF page per slide, turned with the arrow keys), and paper for the teams' answers. Print practice.pdf (3 pages for pupils; the key page is for the teacher) and quiz.pdf (page 1 for pupils, page 2 is the key), one copy per pupil. Pupils should already know the present simple and basic everyday verbs. It goes well after a lesson on the present simple, and before any work on narrative past tenses.