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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Here's the 5th poster in our new 'Grammar' series. It'll come in handy when you need to practice or review the Past Progressive. Click the image to view the full resolution poster for printing. If ...
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Here's the 4th poster in our new 'Grammar' series. You'll love these simple, yet very effective classroom activities to teach or review the Present Progressive! Click the image to view the full re ...
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Hello Guys! This is my first post, it's a music made by Pearl Jam, it's a nice way to make students practice simple past, past continuous, and also verbs in the past, you can change the music the ...
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It's about verb to be. It shows the singular and plural, and lets the student practice a little too. It's about the affirmative form only. There's a simple exercise with real use examples. You can ...
This is a PowerPoint presentation explaining various ways how to express future in English. Each slide gives the name of the grammatical structure, how it is formed, in which situations it is used ...
This worksheet is a very simple way of revising "have got". It stars with a simple sentence to write after observing a dialogue and then pupils will do a pairwork which allows them to revise short ...
This is a worksheet for elementary students on daily routines related vocabulary and the present simple tense. There are 4 different and easy activities in which students are asked to look at the ...
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Weather girl/boy activity: The document has weather symbols to cut out and use. I usually get the student to draw a Map of Spain or other country and have them choose five cities. They make up a w ...
There are some exercises where students must choose Simple Present or Present Continuous. It's for 5th grade students. It's clear and will help them. It has time expression which will help them fi ...
In these exercises you have to choose the correct form of verb in Simple Present or Present Continuous. It's for 5 or 6 grade. It's useful and it got many exercises. It'll help you a lot. Try it!
Here's the second poster in the new 'Grammar' series, this time about teaching the Simple Past. Even though some of you may be familiar with a few of these nice and short activities, we're sure so ...
Here's the first poster in the new 'Grammar' series, we hope it will come in handy. You may already be familiar with some of these simple, yet effective activities to present of review the Simple ...
This worksheet is useful to make pupils revise nationalities and countries. There is also a pairwork activity where they can manipulate the present perfect. It ends up with a third-person summary. ...
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This worksheet helps students to contrast past simple and past perfect tense with different excercises. It is suitable for intermediate and upper intermediate levels and useful in the classroom. I ...
I used this with my 4th graders, they all are learning English as a second language. I chose this song because it matches the theme of the unit (we're using Brainwave 4) and the kids love Toy Sto ...
This is a good song to work with daily routines and present simple. It's good to introduce new terms such as comb your hair, put on make up and run for the bus. It is also a good song to introduce ...
This worksheet has been planned for a pre-intermediate class, to rehearse the use of Simple Present and Present Progressive while listening to the song. After the first part of the activity, a sp ...
This test is divided into 4 section - A: Present tenses, B: Past tenses, C: Future Tenses and D: Mixed Tenses. It tests all the verb tenses in their simple, continuous, perfect and perfect conti ...
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