Verb tenses are some of the most important aspects of a new grammar’s language - and also one of the trickiest to get right in the beginning. As an ESL teacher, you know how challenging it can be to design tense exercises that keep students engaged, while also making sure they’re well-drilled on the fundamentals of a certain tense. Balancing the need to teach proper use of the past simple tense with the need for fun and challenging activities in the classroom can often seem like a chore.
Different teachers take different approaches to this challenger. Some simply drill their students on tense until the students can successfully produce every form of a given verb - as was the practice for decades - while others take a more modern approach, and try to mix it up in the classroom with a hodgepodge of games, reading, speaking, and other exercises. Your approach may involve any or all of these elements - which is why it’s important to have a diverse grab-bag of resources at your disposal.
BusyTeacher.org has got you covered. Our 1,057 past simple tense worksheets are guaranteed to keep your students talking, creating sentences, and working together to help each other learn the rules of how an English verb is used in the past simple tense. These worksheets provide a variety of interesting and relevant topics, which means your students can take what they’ve learned out of the classroom, and start applying it to their real-world English speaking and writing, right away.
Some of our past simple tense worksheets are just simple verb lists and grammar exercises - all complete with pronunciation guides and usage examples, of course. Others use popular songs whose lyrics fall mostly into the past simple tense - freeing you from the hassle of tracking down a song that’s useful for teaching this tense. Other worksheets help you bring writing or speaking exercises into the classroom, and encourage students to use the past simple tense to talk about their own lives. And still others lay out the rules for board games, so your students can play and learn at the same time.
One handy feature of BusyTeacher.org is the ability to view any of our 1,057 past simple worksheets as a thumbnail, without having to click and wait for the worksheet to load. This is a handy time-saver, as it can give you a general idea of what each worksheet looks like without requiring you to even leave this page. Plus, every worksheet on this site is completely free to download and use in your lessons - you don’t even have to register or provide any information to us in return.
How can you be sure these worksheets will work for you? Because they all come directly from the classrooms of ESL teachers around the world, who’ve found them to be especially effective for teaching the past simple tense. Got a worksheet of your own that you’d like to share? Just click the “Submit a worksheet” button at the bottom of this page, and you can join our worldwide community of contributing teachers.
So scroll down, check out our worksheets, and find out what benefits BusyTeacher.org has to offer your classroom!
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A past tense (abbreviated pst) is a grammatical tense that places an action or situation in the past of the current moment (in an absolute tense system), or prior to some other event, whether that is past, present, or future (in a relative tense system). Not all languages mark verbs for the past tense (Mandarin Chinese, for example, does not); in some languages, the grammatical expression of tense is mixed with the expression of mood and/or aspect (see Tense-aspect-mood). In English, there are two verb forms which are commonly called "past tense", the so-called simple past, sometimes misleadingly called the preterite, which is a true tense, and the present perfect, which is generally considered an aspect rather than a tense. These combine with other aspects including the continuous and progressive aspects to create several additional forms: Simple past is formed for regular verbs by adding -d or – ed to the root of a word. Examples: He walked to the store, or They danced all night.
There is a short info section on the rules for Passive Voice, form and use for two tenses: Present Simple and Past Simple. There are two exercises to practise the Present Simple & the Past Sim ...
An awesome collaborative or individual exercise to practice writing, speaking, sequencing, storytelling, follow up questions and much more! Use the images as prompts to tell a story. Brainstorm vo ...
It is a lesson plan for teachers to use in the classroom. It is a 20 minutes lesson focusing on speaking and grammar and teaching students the difference between past & present tense. This les ...
This is a worksheet suitable for Elementary or Pre-Intermediate students who are interested in celebrities and romance. The activity allows students to re-construct the timelines of two love stori ...
This worksheet will help your students to practise making negative sentences and questions in past simple with irregular verbs. They already have the affirmative ones and just have to complete the ...
Shakespeare is one of the most popular writers the world has ever known. His creations are still popular today and millions of people still admire them. April is a good month to talk about William ...
The following worksheets consist of two pages about the past tense. They emphasize the difference between regular and irregular verbs and start with a presentation, followed by practice, and endin ...
This is a short text adapted from a blog presenting an interview in reported speech. I have created questions to help students understand the text and also help them prepare for a role play. There ...
FDR's request to Congress to declare war on Japan in retaliation for the attack on America is historic and iconic, as much for the structure of the speech as for the gravity of the attack itself. ...
This worksheet serves as an introduction to how to use English language expressions in describing a pie chart for ESL or EFL students. It includes vocabulary, comprehension and sentence-level writ ...
This is a great dialogue worksheet for learners who have difficulty learning some grammar topics such as past simple, past continuous and past perfect. This worksheet is not suitable for young lea ...
These role play cards are designed for elementary to pre-intermediate learners. There are 6 different scenarios split between the police, ambulance and fire service. Students work in pairs to prep ...
This is a lesson produced to work with high school students to develop past tenses and the ability of telling and writing stories. The activities are contextualized through the genre Urban Legends ...
This is a simple crossword designed for elementary / pre-intermediate / intermediate students. It has been designed to help students learn the differences between past simple and present perfect, ...
This is a list of several questions designed to help teach verb tenses. The questions are divided into Simple Present, Simple Past, and Simple Future. This worksheet also contains a bunch of Mixed ...
This is a little poem I came up with as a metaphor for the narrative tenses. You can use it as a poster or a fun handout for higher level groups. You can ask them why each metaphor is used and do ...
This is a worksheet to revise the narrative tenses, namely the past simple, past continuous and past perfect. It allows students to practice their listening, reading, pronunciation, vocabulary and ...
This is a simple worksheet about passive voice (using simple past). It has a brief description about the passive voice and its structure in the simple past and items. Item 1: write the sentences u ...
Listening activity which may be used as a warm-up or a follow-up activity to practice the simple past tense. Students listen to the song and try to write the correct forms of the verbs in the blan ...
It is designed for listening practice particularly while teaching the past simple tense. The song used to be very famous performed by Spice Girls, so the class might enjoy it very much. You just h ...
This song is an easily understandable duet. The worksheet is divided into five activities, mostly requiring simple past and gerund; The 1st and 2nd exercises are to fill ...
This is a worksheet that I put together for my adult A1 class but I think it would also work well for an A2 class or any other for some good old music culture, for that matter. It contains a biogr ...
Listening activity for beginners, this is useful to study was/were and verbs in simple past, by the way the song is great! Icludes filling gaps and ordering sentences activities as well. Wor ...
It's an amazing worksheet about what ss did on their last vacation. You'll find here a wordsearch, questions about what people did last weekend, also activities such as reading comprehensio ...
It uses the song "Creep" by the British band Radiohead to work on present simple, present progressive and past simple tenses. This is the uncut version so if your students are sensitive to bad lan ...
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