 Now we'll look at a teaching idea for the past continuous. As we mentioned earlier, the continuous tense is quite conducive to using pictures and talking about actions. Here, what we'll do is we'll switch it back to the past. In this activity, we'll cut up our cards before our class and give each pair of students a group of these cards. What they'll do is flip over a card at random, they'll need to choose a time and then create a sentence for what the people in the pictures were doing at that time. So if they pick up this card here, a possible sentence might read, at three o'clock yesterday, he was studying. Bear in mind that the same activity can be used for different purposes. We could use the same activity we just saw, however, with students who are more comfortable with the past tenses and contrasting them. Here, we might compare and contrast the past simple to the past continuous. Again, we would cut up our cards, have our students turn the cards over at random, but now they'll make sentences such as, while I was studying yesterday, I received a phone call. While she was swimming, she saw a shark.