I NEED IDEAS TO TEACH SIMPLE PAST TO A CLASS OF 35  14 YEAR-OLD TEENS!!!!!!!!!!! THIS IS MY FIRST TIME TEACHING TEENS AND I FEEL CLUELESS. I AM ASKED TO SET A CONTEXT, TO PRESENT VOCABULARY (REGULAR VERBS) AND TEACH THE AFFIRMAT FORM OF THOSE VERBS.

COULD SOMEBODY BE KIND SO AS TO HELP ME , PLEASE? 

There are several ways to work on this topic. Two that work especially well with teens, in my experience, are having them make a day to day list of their activities from the previous week , and talking/ writing about their last holiday. In the first activity you can make a diary-like template for them to complete with the base or infinitive form of the verbs naming their activites. After everyone has completed it, you can ask: Who played football last week? or Who went to the movies last week?, etc. Finally you have each student tell one thing that they did the previous week. a good thing to do is to write the past form of the verb on the board when you ask the questions, in order for them to have a reference to use when they say their sentence in past simple. You can work on their last holiday the same way.

It tends to be difficult to separate regular and irregular verbs when talking about past activities because so many of the most frequently used verbs are irregular in past. Maybe you could give them a list of 10 or so regular verbs and have them choose from that list when talking about their past activities/ holidays.

Remember to stress how easy the past tense is in English, that the Ss only have to learn 1 form of the verb for all the differnet people, whereas in Spanish, they must learn 6 forms of a verb for every tense. That also gives them a positive perspective.

Hope I have helped you out. Let me know if you have any questions. Good luck!

 

About teaching simple past,

there are many "projects" which work fine : fairy tales ( but your students might be too old for this ? ) & crime , detective stories.

You could have students be d�tectives & suspects ; have a pairwork about alibi ; have them tell/ write a story about a robbery ; a crime maybe ; have them play/make up �boardgames such as �" Find the culprit" ; " Who did it ? ", etc.

Another great project�using the Simple Past is Writing biographies : how about having your students search the Net for famous people : movies, music, inventions, history ...? & have them write bios using posters, etc ?

Just a few ideas thrown in ; I hope they can help. I think one thing is important : We are not teaching grammar - we are using grammar, to teach the language.�The better we do it, the more interesting & motivating our lessons can be to our students....

I �ll be glad to help if any questions �

Val�