 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 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 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, very similar to presenting a picture with activities to students and having them report what the people are doing at the present time using the present continuous tense. What we'll do here is have the students do the same thing, but now we'll give them two or three minutes to look at the picture and try to remember what the people are doing before we turn the picture over and then ask the students to create sentences about what the people were doing in the picture. Hopefully, the students would be able to create sentences such as, a woman was bringing flowers to her mother, a man was pouring water, a doctor was showing an x-ray to the patient. Remember that most activities can be varied so as to increase interest levels. If you've got a nice competitive group of students who feel confident about their grammar, you could create the same activity but make it into a competition. So after the two minutes of memorizing the picture, you turn a picture over and challenge each group of students to come up with more sentences than the other groups. At the end of it, you'll see which group came up with the most correct sentences and obviously give them their due congratulations. Working off our previous MIME idea for the present continuous, now we can use the same idea for the past continuous. The key difference here will be that while a student is doing the MIME, the students in the audience are not able to guess what the person is doing. Rather, you'll have them stop first, then have the group making sentences for the past. So a student may get a card such as drawing, driving or cooking. They do their MIME of the action and they stop. Only then can we have the rest of the students make their guess using the past continuous tense.