15 Fun Activities For Present Simple

15 fun activities for Present Simple/Present Continuous
The best way of teaching the present tenses is to compare and contrast them. These ideas will show you how to do the even more difficult task of combining them in practice activities, all of them done in simple and entertaining ways.
Written by Alex Case for TEFL.net
There are many well-known and fun activities for the Present Continuous,such as ones involving miming and ones using pictures of crowded street scenes. There are also quite a few things you can find in photocopiable activity books for the Present Simple, such as timetables where students have to fill the gaps in by asking each other questions. However, by far the easiest and clearest way of showing the meanings and uses of the Present Simple and Present Continuoustenses is to contrast them. Perhaps the main reason why this approach isn’t used more in the classroom is that it can be difficult to find speaking and writing activities with a natural mix of the two tenses. These activities aim to do away with that lack once and for all!
1. Mimes plus
Give students a list of Present Continuous sentences that they can mime to their partners for them to guess,e.g. “You are eating bread and jam.” You can add the Present Simple to this by choosing actions that some people do every day (e.g. “You are eating spicy food” and “You are blowing your nose”) and asking them to go on to discuss how often they do those things and why. This is more interesting if it is a topic that is linked to cultural differences, e.g. table manners.
2. Mimes plus Two
Another wayof combining Present Continuous mimes with the Present Simple is to ask students to mime actions that they do in their real lives (perhaps choosing from a list with sentences like “You are taking a shower”). The people watching the mimes have to make a Present Continuous sentence to describe the action and also make a true Present Simple sentence about the person miming and that action (e.g. “Youtake a shower every morning” or “You sometimes take a shower but you usually take a bath”).
3. Definitions game
Give students a list of words and ask them to choose one and describe it with just sentences using the Present Simple and Preset Continuous. For example, if the word is “breathe” they could say “I do this many many times every day” and “Everyone in the world is doing this now exceptsome divers.”
4. 20 questions
With the same list of words as in Definitions Game above, students ask each other Present Simple and Present Continuous Yes/No questions until they guess which of the words their partner chose. Possible questions include “Are you doing this now?”, “Is anyone in this class doing this now?”, “Are many people in this city doing this now?”, “Do you do this every day?” and“Do you do this more than twice a week?”
5. Postcards
Ask students to imagine that they are writing a postcard while they are sitting on the balcony of their hotel room, on the beach or outside a café. They should naturally use the Present Continuous to describe what is happening at the moment they are writing (e.g. “The sun is shining” or “The children are playing beach volleyball”) and thePresent Simple for their daily routine while on holiday (e.g. “I spend most of the day next to the swimming pool” or “I have breakfast in the same café every morning”), but you could also specifically ask them to stick to those tenses. Alternatively, you could give them sentence stems that should get them using those two tenses, e.g. “All around me…” or “In the evenings…” You can then get studentsto read other people’s postcards with a task to do as they are reading, for example to guess which place the person writing was supposed to be in or to choose the best holiday.
6. Chain postcards
Especially if you have prepared sentence stems for the start of each line of the postcard, you can combine the ideas in Postcards above with the famously fun game Chain Writing (= Consequences). Each...