Past Simple vs. Past Perfect ESL Activities

ESL Past Simple vs. Past Perfect Activity - Speaking: Asking and Answering Questions from Prompts, Controlled and Freer Practice In this engaging past simple vs. past perfect activity, students ask 'Had you...?' questions to compare earlier and later past events, and then ask past simple follow-up questions to find out more details. First, students go through the items on the worksheet and review the past perfect 'Had you...?' questions they need to ask in the activity, e.g. 'Had you owned a pet before you turned seven?' Students then go around the class, asking their classmates the 'Had you...?' questions. When a student finds someone who answers 'Yes, I had', they write down the person's name and then ask a past simple follow-up question to gain more information, noting down the answer in the last column before moving on to speak to someone else. If a classmate replies 'No, I hadn't', the student asks a different question or repeats the question with another person. This process continues until the students have completed each item on the worksheet with a different name and answer, one classmate per item. Afterwards, students give feedback to the class on the answers they collected. show less

ESL Past Simple vs. Past Perfect Worksheet - Grammar Exercises: Binary Choice, Matching, Gap-fill, Identifying, Rewriting Sentences - Speaking Activity: Asking and Answering Questions from Prompts, Controlled and Freer Practice - Pair Work In this productive past simple vs. past perfect worksheet, students practice using the past simple and the past perfect with time expressions like 'before', 'after' and 'when' to show which past action happened first and to talk about their own experiences. First, students read two example sentences and underline the correct answers in the grammar statements. Students then match sentence halves together and underline the correct tense in each complete sentence. Next, students complete sentences with the verbs in brackets in their correct past simple or past perfect form. After that, students read a grammar rule and cross out 'had' in the sentences in which it can be omitted. Next, students rewrite past simple sentences using the past perfect and the time expressions in brackets. Finally, in pairs, students ask and answer questions using prompts to practice using the past simple and past perfect in meaningful contexts. show less

ESL Past Simple vs. Past Perfect Activity - Grammar Speaking: Guessing, Asking and Answering Questions, Labelling, Describing, Freer Practice - Pair Work In this challenging past simple vs. past perfect activity, students practice ordering past events on timelines by asking and answering past simple and past perfect questions. To begin, Student A picks up a card showing the order of activities of a weekday and reads out the sentence in bold, e.g. 'On Monday, I worked in the office.' Student B then completes the corresponding sentence on their worksheet and looks at the activity marked in the middle of that day's timeline and the other four activities for the day shown beneath. Next, student B tries to work out which activity happened right before and which happened right after the middle activity. They do this by asking questions that use the past perfect for the earlier activity and the past simple for the later one. If Student A answers 'Yes', their partner labels the timeline with the corresponding activity. If not, their partner continues asking until they identify the correct activity. Once both adjacent activities are identified, Student B uses them to form the next questions and work out the remaining order. When the timeline is complete, the card is removed, and the students swap roles. When all the timelines have been completed, students take turns describing their partner's weekdays using the past simple and past perfect. show less