 We use the passive voice for the following reasons. When the agent is unknown, a man was murdered last night. Who murdered the man? We don't know. When the agent is unimportant, their house was built in 1950. Who built the house? We don't really care and it doesn't particularly matter. When we want to change the focus, Macbeth was written by Shakespeare. Rather than focusing on Shakespeare, who wrote Macbeth, we want to focus more on Macbeth, the story. Finally, we use the passive voice when we want to conceal the agent. We might say, I was told you stole my money. A teaching idea for the passive voice could be something such as a pelmanism or matching game. Here we have different sentences, half of which are written in the active voice and the other half in the passive voice. The idea is for students to turn one of each over and identify whether or not they match each other. The cards will all be faced down and a student might turn over the mice are being eaten by snakes and then the snakes were eating mice. Of course, these sentences don't match and the students would turn the cards back over. The next student might turn over the mice were being eaten by snakes and the snakes were eating mice. The students should know that those two cards match and take them off the board. The game would continue until there were no cards remaining. Note that you would need to have at least 12 to 16 cards for the game to be effective.