While some aspects of a new language are fairly easy to teach, tenses can pose a challenge because they vary so much from one language to another. ESL teachers - particularly new ones - tend to struggle a little with teaching tenses, because it’s not always easy to explain exactly how a given tense works in English; or how it contrasts with other, similar tenses. Throw in the problem of teaching tenses in ways that keep students active, interested, and learning, and you’ve got a recipe for a difficult lesson on your hands.
Not all teachers handle these issues in the same ways. The classic approach would be simply to drill students on grammar until they get it right - but that approach has fallen out of use, in favor of a more integrated teaching method that combines speaking, reading, activities, and other forms of learning. The challenge for the modern ESL teacher, then, is to find ways of presenting each tense that enable the students not only to learn it correctly, but also to be able to produce it and use it dynamically in sentences.
That’s exactly where BusyTeacher.org’s 4,456 verb tense worksheets come in. They’re designed by real ESL teachers to help students see how each tense is used, see examples of different applications for it, and practice using it in all kinds of different exercises. With these worksheets, teaching tenses turns from a dull repetitive process into an engaging series of learning activities, that’ll inspire your students to take what they’ve learned out of the classroom and use it in their actual English conversations.
Our 4,456 tense worksheets cover each tense in the book, from present simple to future perfect continuous - and all things in between. They cover singular and plural verbs, irregular verbs, active and passive verbs, positive and negative verbs, and every other form of a verb you want to teach. In combination with the more rigorous rules laid down in your school’s textbook, these worksheets will give students the practice they need to understand every way in which English verbs can be formed.
In addition to all the verb forms our worksheets cover, they’ll also help you introduce variety into your classroom in another way: by giving you a wide variety of different exercises for practicing verbs in various situations. Some of our worksheets, for example, include simple examples and fill-in-the-blank exercises - while others will help your students organize little drama presentations, play games like “pronoun dice” or a quiz show, or read silly stories and lyrics to popular songs - all targeted at teaching the rules for using one particular verb tense or set of tenses.
These worksheets have been proven to work in classrooms of ESL teachers around the world - and in fact, that’s exactly who contributed them to this site. They’re all free to download and use without any registration, and you’re even free to submit your own worksheets if you’d like - just click the “Submit a worksheet” button at the bottom of this page, and join our international community of English teachers helping English teachers!
All our worksheets can be previewed in thumbnail view before you click and download them - so just take a scroll down this page, see what catches your eye, and try out anything that looks interesting in your classroom. We guarantee you’ll love the results!
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This is a video worksheet based on a video on New Headway Itutor, A Day in the Life. The video is about a man's daily routine. The grammar focuses on Present Simple. The file contains some questio ...
It's a fun way to practise present simple and some winter vocabulary. Play it as a usual sea battle game! It's very easy and can be played in pairs. Students start to play and for ...
This worksheet is based on Rio 2. It contains three activities for you to work with your students before, while, and after watching the first 15 minutes of Rio 2. It helps you to check the student ...
This is a movie worksheet based on Hop. It contains three activities for you to work with your students before, while, and after watching the first 15 minutes of "Hop". It is appropriate for eleme ...
This activity is to help students see the difference between the present perfect & past simple. It´s a conversation based class for which a dice is needed or students can just pick numbe ...
Full lesson plan for intermediate level, but could be used for advanced levels as well. Lesson is orientated around the ability to give excuses (imaginitive ones!).Poetry - past tense - compound ...
This sheet includes a short biography of Guy Fawkes followed by simple past exercises: find the past or present of the given verb, underline the date/time expressions, make notes about his life, w ...
This is a worksheet for teaching the present simple tense at elementary level. There are 3 different activities in which students are asked to answer the questions about the text, complete th ...
The purpose of this board game is to practice the different uses of present perfect in a fun way. The players move across the board and when they land in a square they must say a sentence in pre ...
Teaching material : YouTube. Objectives: to stimulate students to practice listening and speaking from some amusing VDO like Yahoo or YouTube. Instructions : 1) The teacher provides the worksheet ...
There are 2 parts. The first part is fill-in-the-gap and the other is arranging sentences into meaningful paragraphs. The arranging paragraph is a little advanced because it has more than 6 s ...
Short rules of present simple. Affirmative sentence, negative sentence, interrogative sentence, interrogative-negative sentence . It's very easy to understand the rule of present simple and ...
This PowerPoint includes different chores, such as sweeping the floor, making the bed, washing the dishes, etc. It contains nice photos to convey the meaning. Each slide contains a "how often" que ...
This PowerPoint contains some free time activities, such as listening to music, playing chess, collecting barbie cards, etc. The students will learn the new words and phrases through the context. ...
In this worksheet learners are asked to fill in a story about Tom, with illustrations to facilitate them write the words needed and also to put the verbs in brackets in the the right past tense. I ...
A handy way to gauge how much your students know already about the differences between the two tenses. I normally use this after having asked a few questions using a combination of past simple and ...
It's a good poem to learn irregular verbs. The three forms of the verbs are structured in a verse. It's an easy way to remember them. This worksheet is very good for students of different levels f ...
This is a reading comprehension worksheet for teaching or revising the present simple tense at elementary level. Students are asked to read the text, answer the questions, complete the senten ...
This is PowerPoint presentation that is appropriate for intermediate students. You can use it for teaching past tense and used to, and also new vocabulary items. It shows how people live, tr ...
This is PowerPoint presentation that is appropriate for intermediate students. You can use it for teaching past tense and used to, and also new vocabulary items. It shows how people live, tr ...
This is a PowerPoint presentation which I used for my elementary and pre-intermediate students. It is appropriate for learning and reviewing some daily routines and times. It includes some picture ...
This is a PowerPoint presentation which is appropriate for elementary students. It includes some pictures and some useful sentences children can use in parks or playgrounds. It can be good for stu ...
Here is a worksheet that is related to present continuous, and different parts of a house. Your students are supposed to look at the picture and complete the sentences in Present Continuous with p ...
This worksheet is appropriate for learning the present continuous tense. It includes some pictures that are related to playing in the playground. The students are supposed to look at the pictures ...
It is a worksheet presenting the present simple tense (with Polish comments) and tasks to practice it. In the first one students have to change positive sentences into negatives and questions. In ...
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