Today I'd like to share a lesson idea with you. The lesson is based on a material created by Funglish, which you can find here. It's a game of bingo designed to practise the Present Simple and the Present Continuous tenses. I used it to create a presentation which turned my lesson into a GAME SHOW!! 😃

So, to recreate my game show lesson, which by the way is a revision lesson for both tenses, you need a couple of items. You can buy them online or in FlyingTiger - every teacher's favourite shop 😅 You need:

1. a wheel of fortune - I got mine at FlyingTiger ages ago and finally got to use it!

2. answer buzzers - I got mine online, also ages ago, I think it was here

3. paper and pens

4. tasks/questions presentation

The game show was divided into three rounds. We played it in three teams of 5, 5 and 6 students (that's how many students I had in my lesson on that day, you can have more teams with various number of players).

Round 1: Spin the wheel!

In this round each team gets a go and it's only that specific team that gets to answer the question displayed on the board. One member of the team gets to come up to the board and spin the wheel. The wheel decides what type of sentence they will have to create: a positive statement, a negative statement or a question (I stuck sticky notes with ✔︎, ✘ and ? on my wheel). The student who spins the wheel has to create a sentence, but they can consult with the other members of the team. If the sentence is correct the team gets a point.

Like I said earlier, I used Funglish bingo cards as questions. In this round each slide looked like the one below:

So, as you can see, the students need to decide which tense to use: they have to know the time expressions. Once they decide on the tense they have to remember how to create a sentence in that tense.

We had 15 questions in that round, so each team got to spin and answer 5 times.

Round 2: Who gets there first?!

In this round the students got to use the buzzers. The buzzers I have in my classroom do not light up but they make different sounds. I wish I had the ones that light up! That would be even more exciting for the kids 😅

In this round the slides on the board looked like this:

The task was to create 3 sentences. The fist one had to be a positive statement, the second one a negative statement, and the third one a question. In their teams, students had to write the sentences on paper provided. Only one member of the team could do the writing, and that person changed with each new slide. Once the sentences were written down the team would press their buzzer to signal that they're finished. I would check the sentences, if they were correct the team got 3 points; if they were incorrect I would move on to the team who pressed the buzzer second.

We had 6 slides in this round.

Round 3: The lightning round ⚡️

In this round each team picked one representative. This player got 1,5 minutes to create as many correct sentences as they could. The slides showed which type of sentences they had to make:

And there you go! It took us 45 minutes to do all of this. The kids loved it, they were 100% involved from the moment they entered the classroom.

The classroom was set up before the lesson: three tables, each one with a buzzer, some paper and a pen. I let them in one by one. Each table had the names of the team members on it so they knew were to sit but they didn't know why. I put them into teams to make sure that each team had equal chances of winning. Otherwise I know that all "strong" students would sit together.

You can create your own questions for this game which makes it pretty much universal as far as tenses go. I'm planning to do it again once we finish covering Past Simple. This time round they'll have to remember all 3 tenses!

Feel free to use this idea with your students. Let me know in the comments section if they liked it 😊

#english #revision #game #presentsimple #presentcontinuous