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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Practice personal and object pronouns. It involves simple present, ideal for beginner adults. The song is slow, so you can practice pronunciation, listening and discussing the meaning&n ...
There are 12 slides in this PPT on past tenses. Students have to look at the pictures and decide which tense to use: past simple or past continuous. The PPT is good for revising and practising the ...
This test revises the present simple tense - affirmative, negative, questions, short answers, using prepositions of time - on, at, and it also deals with time telling. There is a reading and writi ...
The power point gives a brief overview of which time tags to use with which grammar tense: present simple or present progessive. It then offers a fun game for students to try and choose the best s ...
This is a useful woksheet about personal hygiene using present continuous. This woksheet is for primary students- beginners. Here I've taken into account their skills. They are learning to write a ...
This a fun letter soup to practice verbs in past tense. It can be used after you've introduced the past tense and even make a couple of sentences using the verbs in it, change them to negative for ...
This is a very simple worksheet for revising past simple at elementary level. There are two easy activities in which students are asked to complete the sentences with the right form of the ve ...
This is a worksheet for teaching present continuous with future meaning at elementary level. There's a simple activity in which students are asked to put the given sentences into the immediat ...
This is a simple worksheet of present progressive aimed at kids with the most common verbs we can find in any text book such as jump, tidy, make or play. The verbs are included on a list and ...
This is a presentation I made for my primary school students who start studying the present simple tense. It includes some of the basic rules and practice exercises. Children have to work with the ...
Learning can be fun with mnemonics. When we were kids, rhyming songs and phrases were some of the gimmicks used to make us remember different things. I hope sorting these irregular verbs into rhym ...
It can be used to give personal information and it can be used to participate in class to ask or give personal information using wh-questions about first name, last name, address, age, nationalit ...
I play "Go Fish" using vocabulary cards I make by inserting clip art into the template for 2" by 4" labels and mounting them on index cards. Before playing the game in my adult beginning level cl ...
This worksheet contains different tasks to the song "Lemon Tree" by Fool's Garden: mark the sentences T(true) or F(false), fill in the chart, find and correct grammar and spelling mistakes. I hope ...
This worksheet contains 5 different activities to do with the lyrics: form the present continuous tense, unscramble the words, find the antonyms and order the sentences. So many things to do with ...
This is a worksheet that focuses on the use of past simple and continuous combined. The first exercise is a gapfill where the students have to write the verb in brackets in past simple or continou ...
Students read a summary of Nicholas Sparks' book, "The Notebook" and must check the verb tense. The summary is meant to be written in present simple, but some verbs are in a different tense ...
This is the second part of the Monster Inc. movie worksheet. It's for elementary students. After watching the last 45 minutes of the movie, students have to answer some questions using Simpl ...
This worksheet is for elementary to pre-intermeidate teenagers or adults practising past simple questions and answers, asking follow up questions and finding students in the class with the same an ...
This worksheet provides speaking practice for finding items in a store. Students work in pairs. One student completes the worksheet, placing grocery store items on shelves. The partner then com ...
This worksheet can be used in preparation for writing nursing workplace documentation. It includes exercises using focused patient care vocabulary, sentence structure and past tense verbs. It use ...
I've created this exercise to practise 'have/has got' together with the vocabulary of animals. It is an easy exercise which can be used in various forms, such as for groups or for individual stude ...
A starter level worsheet for practicing the phrase "this is" and the opposites "big and small" in positive and negative sentences. It can be mostly used for reading. It has illustrations and short ...
These are three people´s opinions about the restaurant called "Captain's table". This reading is good for elementary students practicing simple past. They can also find some adjectives which ...
It is a boardgame for guessing jobs. Teacher can form groups of 3 students, provides them a dice and tell students they are going to guess the job where they land. This boardgame can be used as a ...
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