The simplest use of Present Continuous is to talk about things that are in some way in progress now/ presently/ currently/ at the moment, which is the main focus of this article. This use is often contrasted with Present Simple for present routines/ habits/ repeated actions. In normal communication, Present Continuous is perhaps more useful to talk about future arrangements such as meetings, dates and appointments, but this is so different from the basic meaning that there will be another article on that future use. There are a couple of activities in this article for the much rarer use of Present Continuous to talk about regular habits – often annoying ones – like “She’s always sucking her teeth”.
For all these uses, students will need to practise different forms of “be” (“I am”, “he is” etc.), pronunciation of contractions of “be” (“she’s”, “we aren’t” etc.), and spelling rules for “-ing” verbs. The activities below provide plenty of practice of these, also teaching lots of useful verbs and collocations along the way.
The activities below start with ones with no or minimal resources, move onto ones that need worksheets, and finish with various uses of technology to practise this tense. Ones which could fit into more than one of those sections are described in the more obvious section then briefly mentioned at the end of the other(s). Inside each section, the activities are organised in approximate order of how often I would use them. Most of the worksheets described here are available online for free, often on this site.
Present Continuous tense activities with no or minimal resources
1. Make me say “Yes, I am”/ Make me say “No, I’m not”Students
take turns asking yes/ no questions that they think their partner will
probably say “Yes, I am” to such as “Are you sitting down?” and “Are you
feeling tired?”. They get one point for each positive answer from their
partner, as long as no one has already used that question. Students
might need a list of suggested verbs such as “wear”, “think”, “worry”,
“touch”, “move” and “carry”. You could also allow sentences with your
like “Are your eyelashes moving?”
2. Happening now brainstorming
Students look around the room and/ or out of the window and make as
many true sentences as they can about what is happening, e.g. “She is
breathing” and “They are walking”. If you want to score, give one point
for each sentence that hadn’t been said before, perhaps allowing the
same sentence with a different subject (“He is breathing”, “We are
breathing” etc.) with lower level groups. If you are including actions
in the classroom, you can encourage the other students to do lots of
actions for their classmates to make sentences about, or you can do the
opposite and encourage them to try and stay still and so only
accidentally give their classmates something to describe (e.g. “He is
sniffing”). You might want to allow use of bilingual dictionaries to
boost the level of language used.
You can also do this game with only one person looking and the other
people guessing what is happening outside the window etc., with the
person who is looking giving points for any sentences which are both
factually and grammatically correct.
3. What are you hearing?
Students guess what is happening from what they can hear. The sounds
can be things happening naturally in the class (“A clock is ticking”),
sounds that the teacher or their classmates are making deliberately
(“You are kicking the table”), or things happening on a video or in a
recording. They obviously need to close their eyes for most of these, or
their view can be blocked, for example with a piece of cardboard in
front of the TV or a blanket held up behind which people make sounds. If
you have the technology, groups of students could also gather sounds on
a recording device and then play them back for others to guess, or find
similar sounds online.
Students can just guess what action they are hearing (“Somebody is
moving their desk” etc.), who is doing it (“Who is coughing?” “Joao is
coughing” etc.), or how many people are doing it (“How many people are
jumping?” “Seven people are jumping” etc.)
Suitable actions for students to deliberately make noises with in the
classroom include “opening and closing”, “knocking on”, “pushing”,
“dropping”, “kicking”, and “turning”.
4. Present Continuous things in common
Students work together to find Present Continuous sentences which are
true about both of them, e.g. “We are both sitting down”, “We are both
breathing”, “We are both feeling a little cold” and “Our parents are
working right now”. If you want to score, you can give them one point
for each true sentence which none of the other groups thought of.
5. Present Continuous projects
Students draw the scene that they are told to and add as many
pictures of people doing suitable things for that situation as they can,
with a written description for each. For example, students work
together to draw 20 or so people in a park and label each person with
what they are doing. The pictures can be drawn, cut from magazines, or
found online. The same thing can also be done with animals, robots,
monsters, aliens etc. doing the actions.
The projects can be made more realistic and given context by making
them advertising or instructional posters, e.g. a poster of a theme park
showing all the things that people are having fun doing at one moment
in time, or a poster showing all the things that are good and bad for
the environment that people are doing in a town right now.
6. I don’t know what he’s doing
Students try to ask questions about their partners’ families etc.
that the person answering doesn’t know the answer to, e.g. “What is your
father doing?” and “Is your mother watching TV?”
You can also make this into a bluffing game by students answering all
questions and the questioners guessing which answers are made up,
perhaps after asking for more details like “Why is he/ she doing that?”
and “How do you know?” Especially with this variation, students can also
answer questions about their partners’ neighbours, friends, local
postal worker, boss, teacher in other classes, etc.
7. Present Continuous time zones guessing game
Using a map, globe or list of time zones, a student chooses a country
and describes what is probably happening there now without saying its
name, e.g. “They are sleeping on futons” or “They are eating tacos and
playing guitars”. As well as matching the country, the sentence must
reflect the time in that place (by students calculating from the time
differences). Students continue giving hints until their partner guesses
which country they are thinking of.
8. Present Continuous picture search
Students are given magazines, catalogues or books that include lots
of pictures of people doing different things, e.g. fashion magazines,
picture dictionaries or visual encyclopaedias. Different people can have
the same books etc or different ones each. Students search for pictures
that match what the teacher or a classmate says (e.g. “Someone is
running”) as quickly as possible. They can also search for a picture and
sentence that no one else can find, or search for a picture and
sentence that no one has said yet.
This game can also be played with people spotting things in single
very detailed pictures such as pages from a “Where’s Wally?” book.
9. I’m still not getting through
Students roleplay telephone conversations where one person is trying
over and over to get through to the same other person, with the
receptionist who answers giving a different reason each time why that
person isn’t available. This should eventually lead to more unusual and
amusing excuses like “He’s out jogging”. Students can then brainstorm
and rank good and bad excuses in that situation, and maybe try the same
activity again.
10. We’re boasting on the phone
Students take turns describing the perfect scene where they are,
trying to outdo the other person with how wonderful the situation they
are in is, for example “The sun is shining and the birds are singing”
“That sounds nice. Here are millions of stars are twinkling and a few
flakes of perfect snow are falling slowly from the sky”. You can ask
students to imagine specific scenes such as particular countries,
tourist resorts, or holiday homes. It is also possible to do it the
other way round, with students “boasting” how awful the situation they
are in, with situations like holidays, city living, shared housing and
jobs.
11. Present Continuous memory games
Students describe what is happening now from memory, i.e. without
being able to see what they are speaking about. The simplest way of
organising this is for students to close their eyes and answer questions
about what is happening around them, e.g. “Where is John sitting?” and
“What colour shoes is Jeremy wearing?” Alternatively, they can
brainstorm everything that they can remember without questions to prompt
them.
The same thing can be done with a picture that is turned over or
scene from a video that is turned off, probably after they look for 30
seconds and try to memorise it first.
12. Present Continuous guessing from hints games
Students guess the Present Continuous action or person doing it from spoken clues.
For the guess the action version, hints can include who is doing that
action now (“Many people all over the world are doing this now, but
only a few people in this country are doing it”, “My father is doing it
now, and I guess your father is doing it too”, etc.), or how the person
who is doing it feels (“I’m feeling bored/ excited/ scared/ etc.”)
Students can guess the person from Present Continuous hints like
“He’s working now”, “He’s probably sitting in front of a computer” and
“He’s almost certainly wearing a tie”. The person can be someone who the
person speaking knows (e.g. a family member) or someone with a certain
job.
The time zones game above is a variation on this.
13. Present Continuous spelling code game
Give or dictate a list of numbers associated with each letter of the
alphabet, e.g. “A = 23”, “B = 16”, etc. After checking that students
have the right list of numbers written down, read out an –ing form (e.g.
“putting”), a Present Continuous phrase (“I’m wearing”, “He is
sitting”, etc.) or short Present Continuous sentence (“She’s having a
bath”). Students write down what they hear, add up the numbers
associated with those letters, and shout out the total, e.g. “A hundred
and twelve!” The first person to shout out the right answer wins that
round. Students can then take the teacher’s role of reading things out
and judging who got the right answer first.
This game is good for recognising contractions and practising when to
put double letters in –ing forms (“shutting” but not “warnning” etc.)
14. Present Continuous Kim’s game
Students step out of the class, close their eyes or look away. When
they look again, they should list the things which have changed, e.g.
“Henry is wearing a jacket” or “The teacher is sitting down” because
those things changed while they weren’t looking. They can also do the
same thing with pictures with differences (“The old woman is drinking
coffee” because that was different in the first version of the picture
that you showed them) or two scenes from a video (“She is wearing his
jacket” because that has changed while the video has been turned off).
The videos and photos can also be made by students if you have the
equipment.
15. Present Continuous instructional play
Students design and act out a play showing someone doing lots of
wrong things such as things that are bad for the environment, things
which aren’t allowed in school, or things which are dangerous. One of
the people in the group or someone in the audience shouts “Stop” when
something bad happens, the people acting freeze, and their teammate or
someone from the audience says what bad thing is happening which
shouldn’t be, and why it shouldn’t be done.
The same thing can easily be done with the teacher doing the actions, or with students filming their plays on video cameras.
16. Present Continuous 20 questions
One student thinks of a verb and the other person asks questions like
“Am I doing this now?”, “Are you doing this now?”, “How many people in
the world are doing this now?”, “Are most people in Brazil doing this
now?” etc until they guess which action is being thought of. The
students will probably need suggested questions like these, and maybe a
list of possible verbs like “breathe” and “sit”.
17. Present Continuous picture similarities and differences
Give students pictures of two busy scenes, e.g. two street
demonstrations, two pictures from Where’s Wally (= Where’s Waldo) books,
or two photos of crowded town squares. Without showing their pictures
to each other, students must find Present Continuous sentences that are
true of both pictures or are only true of one (depending on what you
tell them to do). It’s obviously usually easier to find differences than
similarities in such real pictures.
Many books also have photocopiable version of this, usually with each
pair of students having the same picture with five or ten small
variations, similar to a children’s spot the difference puzzle but again
with students doing it without looking at each other’s pictures. It’s
quite difficult to make your own versions of this, because if you Tippex
a picture and make changes it’s usually too obvious where you’ve done
so. Although this is less satisfying than a single picture, the same
thing works with twelve or so ClipArt pictures of actions on the
worksheets, with four or five of them being at least slightly different.
18. Present continuous tennis
Students “serve” an “I” Present Continuous phrase or sentence such as
“I’m skiing” or “I am taking a photo”, their partner returns with the
second person form of the same thing, e.g. “You’re skiing”. This
continues through all the subjects that you want to practise. To
“return”, the next person must then choose another verb or sentence to
continue the game with such as “I’m feeling hungry”. If anyone makes a
mistake or pauses for too long, they start again with a serve with a new
verb. This continues until someone has reached the number of points
that you set them as a goal, or the person with highest number of points
when you stop the game wins.
19. Bad and worse actions
Students take turns “boasting” about how annoying their (imaginary)
spouse, parents, teacher, friend, siblings etc. are using Present
Continuous, e.g. “My brother is always picking his nose” “That’s
nothing. My sister is always picking her nose and eating it”. Whenever
both sides run out of ideas, they discuss which person actually sounds
more annoying and/ or guess how much of that was actually true about
their real sister etc.
20. We are cutting
Students cut up scrap paper into the shapes of people (or animals,
robots etc.) doing actions. This can be producing what the teacher or a
classmate says (e.g. “A horse is running”, with points for the quickest
and/ or best options), or trying to come up with as many shapes and
matching sentences as possible (written and/ or spoken).
21. He’s doing that first
Students are dealt out pictures which should be in some kind of order
such as a cut-up comic strip (with no dialogue). They have to describe
what is happening to put them back into order without showing them to
each other, e.g. “In my picture a boy is tying someone’s shoe laces
together” and “In my picture a man is falling over, so it must be after
yours”.
What Are You Seeing?, Present Continuous Miming Games and
Present Continuous Drawing Competitions below are also possible with no
or minimal resources.
Photocopiables for classroom practice of Present Continuous
22. Present Continuous miming games
Miming sentences like “You are drinking tea” and “A gorilla is
beating its chest” is by far the most obvious thing to do with the basic
meaning of Present Continuous, as it means students are using the tense
as they see an action in progress. To make that true, the teacher or
students should always continue doing the action until the people
watching guess what is being done (so that it is not more accurate to
say “You jumped” or “You were jumping”).
It’s also possible for students to come up with their own things to
mime. A nice way of doing this is to give them a verb and ask them to
take turns making actions that go with it, e.g. “You’re having a bath”,
“You’re having breakfast” and “You’re having a good time” for “having”.
This can still be done as a guessing game, or students can get one point
for each action they can both say and do. Students could also work in
mixed-sex groups so that they can get one point for each of “I’m
swimming”, “We’re swimming”, “He’s swimming”, etc.
A variation that involves both the teacher giving ideas and students
coming up with their own is the teacher giving a list of complex
processes such as “You are making pizza” and “You are changing a bicycle
tyre”. The students mime single actions from that process one by one,
with their classmates trying to guess both the actions and the larger
process, e.g. “You rolling some dough. You’re making cookies.” “I am
rolling some dough but I’m not making cookies. Here’s the next action”.
Livelier classes might prefer to race to do the mime that the teacher
chooses, with one point for the first correct mime. To make it match
the meaning of being in progress, the sentence will need to be held up
and left up while the miming is going on, or shouted out over and over
(by the teacher and/ or by the people doing the mimes).
Guessing and doing mimes can be made more challenging and fun by the
mimes being made with just hands (e.g. two fingers down representing a
standing person), shadows, puppets, soft toys, etc.
Another kind of miming challenge is for two or more students to try
to exactly mirror each other’s actions, with the people watching trying
to spot and point out differences, e.g. “He’s jumping but she’s hopping”
or “She’s winking one eye but he’s blinking both eyes”.
You can add cultural training to these activities by having gestures
that vary by country, e.g. “You are calling a waiter” or “You are
telling someone that it’s a secret”.
23. Present Continuous drawing competitions
Present Continuous drawing competitions can be to draw a sentence
until the people watching guess what the sentence is, rush to make the
fastest and/ or best picture of the sentence that the teacher or a
classmate says (“She’s playing with a yoyo” etc), or draw and write as
many correct Present Continuous sentences as they can on the topic given
(“At school” etc) within the time limit.
24. Make them doing it
Students arrange slips of paper with words written on them to make
sentences like “He + is + wearing + long + pink + socks” and “The + lion
+ is + sleeping”, then read out their completed sentences.
You can ask them to make sentences of things that they’d like to draw
on a picture, real things that are happening in the classroom, things
that they want people to act out, or just things that could be true.
Whether you want to then eliminate those slips of paper from the game or
put them back onto the table to be also used to make different
sentences later is up to the teacher, but the latter is usually better.
For students who have problems with reading and/ or grammar, you
might want to provide different kinds of words on different coloured
paper and/ or different sizes of paper, e.g. all the subject pronouns on
small pieces of blue paper and all the verbs on larger green paper.
25. Present Continuous accusations
Students ask questions using the Present Continuous about bad things
that they imagine their partner is doing such as “Why are you hitting
your brother?” or “Why are you wearing underpants on your head?” Their
partner must give a reason (i.e. they can’t say that they aren’t doing
it). The person who asked the question can reject bad reasons like
“Because I hate him” for “Why are you hitting your brother?” Note that
students will probably need to be at least Pre-Intermediate level to be
able to explain their reasons in English. They will also probably need a
few on a worksheet to choose from before they start making up their own
accusations.
26. This is what I’m saying
Make a list of functional language which is used in particular
situations, e.g. “I would have loved to, but…” for politely rejecting
invitations or “Thanks for having me” when you leave someone’s house.
The teacher or a student says one or more phrase for one situation and
the other people guess the situation with a Present Continuous sentence,
e.g. “You are rejecting an invitation” or “You are leaving someone’s
house”. More confident classes can also try this game with just a list
of situations (“Apologising” etc) before being given the phrases to use.
27. Bad habits sentence completion bluff
Students fill in the gaps in some sentence stems on a worksheet to
make true and made-up complaints about their neighbours, classmates,
cousins, etc., e.g. “My mother is always telling me
______________________” and “My bus driver is always
_____________________ the steering wheel”. Students fill in at least
half of the sentences with a mix of facts and imagination, then take
turns reading out their sentences. After questions about details (during
which they can continue lying if the sentence was made up), their
partners guess if the sentence is true or false.
28. Shooting blind
This is based on a common use of Present Continuous in movies, namely
someone working for the secret services or police describing what is
going on into a microphone. In the most dramatic version of this game,
one person is blindfolded and given something such as a pencil to
pretend is a gun. One person walks around the room and the other members
of the class describe what they are doing, using a Present Continuous
sentence each time such as “He’s walking in front of the whiteboard” and
“He’s standing behind the teacher”. You’ll need to be strict about use
of this form so that they don’t just use prepositions of position.
Whenever the person with the “gun” feels confident of being able to
shoot the right person (without hitting any innocent bystanders and
obviously without being able to look), they aim and make a shooting
noise. The rest of the class then judges how successful their shot was.
A less dramatic version is for the person to go around the room and
suddenly commit some kind of crime, with the blindfolded person deciding
when to launch an arrest, with announcing too early or late being a
failure.
This can also be done with a video, with the person facing away from
the screen deciding when to shoot or arrest someone from the description
of the people who can see what is going on.
Present Continuous Verb Guessing and Present Continuous
Spelling Code Game above can also be done with worksheets, as can
Present Continuous Time Zones Guessing Game with a worksheet giving the
time zones of different countries. More artistic teachers might be able
to make their own Present Continuous Picture Similarities and
Differences Worksheets.
Technology-based Present Continuous classroom activities
29. Video activities for Present Continuous
Students can guess what is happening just from the sounds on a video
and watch and check, make as many true sentences as they can about a
paused scene, shout out Present Continuous sentences as the video is
playing (getting no points if the action ends before they finish
speaking, as that would make the tense incorrect), or shout out Present
Continuous sentences from their worksheet when they think they are true.
The last of those activities can be good practice for typical
confusions like “He is watching…” and “He is looking at…”, with points
taken off for sentences that are shouted out if they aren’t (exactly)
true.
The shouting out their own ideas for what is happening can also be
limited in some way, e.g. only things which seem dangerous or naughty.
If you have access to videoing technology, groups of students could
also make similar videos for the whole class to do those activities
with.
Shooting Blind above can also be done with a video.
30. Pictures of Present Continuous
Students take digital photos of each other doing actions and then
share them with the class. The challenge can be to come up with pictures
and Present Continuous sentences that no other group has made, to take
obscure photos that are difficult to work out the action from, or to
take photos to illustrate how to do or not to do something, e.g.
different suitable and unsuitable woodworking actions.
31. What are you seeing?
Students guess what action a picture shows even though they can only
see a tiny part of it, it is shrunk very small, or it is very blurred.
It grows or becomes more and more in focus until they get the right
sentence.
This is also possible with pictures where the action is ambiguous due
to the lack of information in them, with things becoming as the teacher
gives hints, a video slowly progresses or they race to read the
explanation in texts on the pictures.
This is easiest with a computer and projector, but can also be done
with an overhead projector. This is also possible without technology by
hiding a card and revealing it bit by bit from behind another card.
32. Celebrities now
Students search social media for what famous people are doing right
now, with points for actions which are probably still happening when
they announce them to the class, plus maybe bonus points for interesting
information. All reports to the class should be in the Present
Continuous tense, e.g. “Justin Bieber is singing in Wembley Stadium”.
This works best with Twitter, because people don’t have to be a member
or be “friended” to read the tweets. They will need to make note of when
the tweet was sent each time so that other people can judge whether it
is still ongoing or not.
33. Only one person is doing it
Students try to make Present Continuous sentences that (just about)
make sense but have only one result on Google or Google images. For
example, I found that was true for “She is eating a desk” or “He is
chewing a feather”. Students will need to use quotation marks (or the
equivalent for other search engines) to make sure that other
combinations of those words don’t come up as results.
34. Present Continuous songs
Quite a few pop songs and children’s songs include a significant
number of Present Continuous sentences, with maybe the most famous being
Tom’s Diner by Suzanne Vega. However, it’s quite difficult to know what
you can do with such songs to actually increase students’ understanding
of or ability to use this tense. Many worksheets online just get
students putting –ing forms or be + ing into gaps, but unless they still
have problems with subject + be or contractions it is difficult to
imagine that they learn much from such an activity. If you can get
students singing along, that should help them memorise the structure and
some of the verbs and collocations in the song. To reinforce that
memory building, you could get them to sing along from more limited
clues than the full lyrics would provide such as lyrics with blanks,
just verb forms in the infinitive, or just pictures.
Personally, I’m a bit too embarrassed to have actual singing in adult
and teenage classes, so the job then is to find alternative things to
do before, during and after listening to the song. Perhaps the best way
is to almost ignore the actual –ing form and have students guess the
collocations instead, e.g. joining subjects and verbs or verbs and
objects, then listening to check. They could also guess what –ing
phrases they will hear from pictures and/ or a description of the
situation described in the song, then listen to check.
35. What are six billion people doing?
Students research data like time zones and populations of countries
to make statements like “Two billion people are sleeping right now” and
“Over one million people are suffering from malaria”. Searching terms
like “are suffering from” and “half the world’s population” might help
them find such info. Students get one point for each sentence that the
class accept is true and no one else thought of. Students will need to
find out when the information was put online so that other people can
judge whether it is probably still true or not, or you can ask them to
update any old figures according to their own ideas of the probable
trends.
Present Continuous Instructional Play above can also be done
with use of a video camera, and Present Continuous Kim’s Game can be
done with a DVD, video camera or digital camera. Present Continuous
Memory Games above can also be done with a DVD. What Are You Hearing?
can be done with a DVD, music player, or recording device.
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