Quote Vickiii_NZ (Post 14542)

Some excellent games on here. I hope this post is continued. Does anyone have ideas for teaching games for one-on-one or small group lessons with adults to teach past tense?

:becky:

Quote little sage (Post 661)

I can't remember which book I learned this from, but it was a great success in my class of 11-12 year olds.

Purpose: to review the past continuous ie. "They were playing basketball".

Preparation: Either have cards with action words ready, or use your text book to point to the actions they have studied in their book.

Method:
1) Divide the class into two teams.
2) Create a space where one team can sit in chairs together and the other team can stand up without tables in the way.
3) Have one team sit down and close their eyes, or face the wall.
4) Monitor that eye closed/no peeking rule, perhaps deduct points for peeking.
5) Show the other team an action verb like "playing basketball".
6) That team silently acts out the action until you say FREEZE.
7) When you say FREEZE every member of the team freezes their current action and holds it.
8) Team one can now open their eyes and see the frozen actors.
9) Each student from the seated team takes a guess at to what Team 2 was doing. "Was she playing tennis?" HINT: Guessing should be fairly swift, poor team one is patiently frozen, remember.
10) A successful guess gives them one point.
11) After all students guess once, point or no point, play proceeds to the next team.
12) Game ends at teacher's discretion.

TIPS: To get the game going at a good pace, use simple sentences like "She was eating". Once the kids are into it, increase the level of difficulty by adding objects (not physical objects, silly) to the sentences. ex. "She was eating spaghetti".

Quote little sage (Post 661)

I can't remember which book I learned this from, but it was a great success in my class of 11-12 year olds.

Purpose: to review the past continuous ie. "They were playing basketball".

Wow! It's a long time since you posted this and I've only just found it!!

Quote smy2brazil (Post 6785)

I did a game with teenagers and with adults, that I called "Crime." I wrote the question on the board:

"Where were you and what were you doing last night at 10:30 pm?" (which is practically a tongue twister for Brazilians, because they don't use the letters "w" and "y" in Portuguese.)

I passed out cards from a regular deck, but only one king and on joker. The joker was the criminal and the king, the detective. The detective had to ask the question to different students to try to discover the criminal. Each of the students who had a plain card (innocent students) had to create an alibi.

"I was at home with my parents, watching TV"
"I was having dinner at a restaurant"
"I was taking a shower at home"

The criminal had to give an alibi that didn't match.

"I was playing soccer at the bakery"
"I was waiting in line at the bank" (which would be closed at that hour)

I liked your games a lot.

Quote Manuela (Post 1674)

From what I know the present perfect continuous has two meanings:
1. An action that started in the past which is still continuing at the moment
e.g. It's 12 o'clock. They have been sleeping for 15 hours. Should I wake them up?
2. When an action has stopped but its results are obvious.
e.g. He's exhausted because he's been working in the garden.
Look the streets are wet. It has been raining.

Past Continuous we use when we know exactly the moment when something was happening in the past.
e.g. What were you doing yesterday at noon?
Time can be established by the occurence of another action.
What were you doing when the phone rang.

In the FREEZE game time is implied. i.e. What were they doing when I said FREEZE?I don't think that any of the uses of the present perfect continuous applies here.
Only if you consider that the positions of the players are obvioius results of what they had been doing. But is a frozen position an obvioius result of an action? I wonder.

Do you still feel that the game practises the PPC? If you do , you have found a perfect game to practise that!:)