Present Simple And Present Progressive Activity

15 fun activities for Present Simple/Present Continuous

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 goon 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 way of 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. “You take 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 justsentences 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 except some 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 thewords 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 oroutside 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 the Present 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 alsospecifically 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 students to 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. Chainpostcards

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 person fills in the first line of a postcard, e.g. completing “I am writing to you from…” with “… the best holiday resort ever” or “… the hills of Tuscany”. They fold over the paper so that thenext person can’t see what they have written and pass it to the next person for them to continue the postcard. They continue writing and passing until the postcards are finished, then they are passed one last time and opened for general hilarity and a discussion about which postcards make most sense, sound like the best holiday and/or are funniest.

7. Present Simple and Continuous taboo topicsThe strange thing about the use of the Present Continuous to talk about the present is that we actually rarely use it in conversation, and least of all to ask typical textbook questions like “What are you wearing?” In fact, questions like “What kind of underwear are you wearing?” are basically taboo. We can take advantage of this by giving a list of such taboo Present Continuous questions...