What Were You Doing When? 4 Great Activities for Past Continuous Tense

There is no shortage of great activities for practicing Past Continuous tense, but it may take some time and review to solidify the point with learners. Here are three great activities to practice Past Continuous tense to get your wheels turning.

Review the Grammar

A quick review of Past Continuous tense will be helpful before you jump into any activities. Ask the students how to construct the tense and have some reminders up on the board. Remind them that the past tense clause expresses some kind of interruption to another activity which is the continuous clause. The interruption didn’t necessarily stop the continuous action, and most likely the continuous action still continued.

Four Activities for Past Continuous

1. 1

   What Were You Doing When…?

   Often you can use Past Continuous tense to talk about memories, or for looking back on what was happening at a specific time. With this activity students ask each other questions that they may or may not remember the answer to. For example What were you doing last Tuesday night at dinner time? or What were you doing when xx important thing happened? You can explain that some historical events or other news events leave such an impression on us, we will always remember what we were doing at the time that thing happened. Sometimes our memories are very clear and sometimes they are not. You may want to provide prompts so the students get the idea and then have them generate their own questions. Some ideas for prompts are: What were you doing when... Or, Where were you when...?

• 9/11 happened (for older students to remember 2001)
• Hurricane Dorian hit or the Central Appalachia flood happened (or a local natural disaster)
• Last Thursday at dinner time
• I tried to call you
• When you heard about the death of Princess Diana

1. You can also make this into a bluff game by telling students who don’t remember to make something up. For example, I was doing laundry when my mom called or I was driving my car when I heard about 9/11. The class can have fun by making unusual statements, such as I was climbing a 10-foot tree, or I was eating 10 hamburgers. Their partners can then guess whether the answer is true or not. This fun bluff game can help find questions and prompt some past continuous answers.

2. 

3. 2

   Alibi

   This game is similar to the murder mystery Clue. You can set it up by having the students create the crime they are going to investigate. After that, students are divided into two groups--suspects and detectives. You want to have more suspects and just 2-4 detectives. The suspects each have to create a story of where they were and what they were doing at the time of the crime. They are then questioned by one of the detective students. The detectives must ask questions pertaining to Past Continuous by only asking questions about the time of the murder. For example they could ask questions like: What were you discussing? or Where was the doctor eating? If you want you could set up a jury as well and have the class vote as to who is guilty and why they don’t believe the alibi.

4. 3

   Word Cards

   Have a stack of cards with random words prepared. Each student will choose two. In rounds have them create a sentence for their pair of words—one word for the past tense clause and one for the past continuous clause. For example, they draw the two words, drive and monkey. A possible sentence could be: I was driving down the street when I saw a monkey in the road. Or you can tell them to be more creative and allow some nonsense sentences. It does make it more challenging and fun if each of the words has to be used in a different clause. To make this activity even more involved you could have the students create sentences that somehow relate to the last person’s sentence to create a silly sort of story of things that were happening at a given time!

5. 4

   Memory Game

   Have a collection of picture cards and hand them out to students to study. Students must hand them back after about four minutes. They must either then write or explain in the past continuous tense what was happening in the picture. If necessary, you can provide a list words that might help them. You can give a score of one point for each sentence that is factually and grammatically correct. The student with the highest score wins.

Past Continuous tense is an important one for learners and it may take some time to master it as well as fully understand how to use it.

Providing variable practice activities and tapping into students’ own experiences will provide an experiential way of practicing what could have been just another boring grammar point.