Activities to practise Present Continuous with kids

Teaching grammar to primary school children must be always fun and engaging. This will get your students to use grammar material properly without feeling bored. Here we present fun activities to practise Present Continuous with your kids.

Miming

Many children adore playing this game, as it is both entertaining and fun. To play this game you need flashcards with different action verbs. Ask your kids to work in pairs. Students choose a flashcard and mime to their partners to guess the verb. The partners must give the answer using Present Continuous, e.g. “You are dancing”, “You are playing football”, etc. You can make the activity more challenging by adding Present Simple. After saying the sentence in Present Continuous, students then ask their partners questions about their daily activities:

Student A: “Are you drinking orange juice?”

Student B: “Yes, I am”.

Student A: “When do you usually drink orange juice?”

Student B: “I usually drink orange juice in the mornings”.

Picture descriptions

Hand out pictures of people doing different things to your students. Ask them to describe the pictures and tell you what people are doing there.

Students can also play this game in pairs. Give each of them a picture with some differences in it. Ask students to tell their partner what they can see in the picture. For example:

Student A: “In my picture, the girl is wearing a pink dress”.

Student B: “In my picture, the girl is wearing a yellow dress”.

Guess the person

Get your students to describe and guess their classmates from what they are doing now and their routines. For example: “This person is sitting on the second row and is wearing a white shirt. He/she usually speaks very loudly”. This will help them to practise the differences between Present Simple and Continous in speech.

Drawing competitions

Set a time limit (5 -7 minutes). One of the students starts to draw a picture showing different actions on the board. While drawing it, the other students may try to guess what he/she is drawing and say a sentence with Present Continuous, e.g. “The girl is running”. The first student who guesses the action and says grammatically correct sentence gets a score. The one who has more scores at the end of the game becomes the winner.

Board games

Board games can be played not only in offline classes but also in online ones. First, you need to share your screen with the students. Then ask them to use Online dice roller and take necessary steps on the board. The game is played in pairs. If you are having an individual class, you can be your student’s partner. The one who is the first to come to the Finish becomes the winner. This kind of board games can be found on Pinterest.

Things in common

Ask your students to work in pairs and to make up sentences with Present Continuous that are true for both of them. For example: “Both of us are wearing blue jackets”, “Both of us are sitting next to the window”. If you also want to get them to practise the differences between Present Simple and Continuous, you can add one more task — to find things that are usually true about both students, e.g. “Both of us usually get up at 8 a.m. ”, “We don’t like Maths”, “Both of us live far from the school”, etc.

Chain flashcards

Cut out flashcards from the picture and hand out them to your students. Ask your kids to put them in a logical order and make up a story using Present Continuous. For example “First, Ann is getting up. In the next picture, she is brushing her teeth. Then she is having breakfast. In this picture, she is having classes at school. She is taking a shower”.

What fun activities do you use with your kids to practise Present Continuous?