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Writer's pictureEwa GĆ³rna

Passive Voice for the busy teacher

Long time no see! šŸ˜„ I'm still alive and kicking just extremely busy. For those of you who don't follow me on Instagram, a quick update: I've quit my job at school and I am no longer a deputy head teacher. Instead I am now a proud owner of my own language school šŸ„³ I've opened the school in September and the last two months have been ... interesting šŸ˜… Long story short - I had no time for anything except for planning lessons. And yes, I can hear some of you thinking "but the last time you've posted anything was in February šŸ¤Ø" ... well ... let's just say that the level of stress I'd been experiencing was not conducive to creativity. Anyway ... I'm here now and I have something new for you/ Actually, I have something old but with a new twist.


I find myself in need of more presentations than printed out and laminated materials ... you know ... I am now the one who has to pay for the toner and the pouches šŸ˜… So I started turning my task cards into KeyNote (PowerPoint equivalent on a Mac) presentations. It's not just my cards put onto slides like here. This time round it's a proper presentation with sentence structure explanations and references throughout the presentation. It's a fully editable material, which means you can add your own sentences or edit anything you don't want or don't like in my examples.


There are 50 sentences in the presentation and they help your students practise Passive Voice in Present Simple, Past Simple, Future Simple, Present Perfect, and with modal verbs. There are 12 slides for each grammar point and those slides appear one after the other, meaning that slides 7-18 are all Present Simple, slides 19-30 are all Past Simple and so on. This lets you practise just one tense at a time. If you wish to mix them up, however, there is a snazzy option for that. The fist slide in the presentation looks like this:


As you can see, each number is a hyperlink which sends you to the slide with the corresponding sentence number. And the sentences are all mixed up šŸ˜Š So sentence no 1 is in Present Simple, sentence no 2 is in Past Simple, sentence no 3 is Present Perfect, then Present Simple again, then a modal verb, then back to past Simple and so on, you get the idea.


Each sentence slide looks like this:


So as you can see the slides are practically identical to my Task Cards, but because they are now slides I could add more helpful input for the students. Imagine your student knows that they should create this sentence using the Present Simple Passive but they don't remember how to form the sentences. No problem! Click on the button with the tense name and quickly revise how to create a Passive Voice sentence:


And, see this little arrow in the right top corner of the slide? If you are a Mac user (Keynote) it will let you go back to the slide you were translating, so there's no need to remember the sentence number. Sadly this option is not available to PowerPoint users (as far as I know) so you'll have to click the Home button and click on the sentence number you were working on to go back to it.


Just like the Task Cards, the slides also offer the isolation of difficulty: all the necessary vocab is provided, in the tight order. The rules are there if a student needs to be reminded of them.


The correct answer is provided after one click so there's literally nothing else for you, the teacher, to do but turn on the presentation and let your students work on each sentence. I suggest having everyone write the sentences in their notebooks and then one student working on the sentence with you, OR a less stress inducing option for the students: let them work on their own and simple show and explain the answers and let them correct their own mistakes.





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