 7 Activities for Teaching the Simple Present for the ESL Classroom ESL teachers often encounter difficulties when teaching grammar patterns to students abroad. The following 7 activities for teaching the simple present for the ESL classroom will help your students pick up the tense in an easy and efficient way. 1. Daily Routine This is a very good activity for when you start discussing the simple present and how it's used for routines and regularities. You can place the students into groups or pairs and have them discuss their daily routines. What do they do in the morning? In the afternoon? In the evening? You can then also have them write up a schedule of their daily routines and share their findings with the class later on in a class discussion. 2. Cultural Norms This activity is great for introducing adverbs frequently used with the simple present. Have your students share things that people do in their country, culture usually, normally, typically, etc. For example, in my country, people usually eat rice for breakfast. The next step is then to encourage your students to make negative statements including adverbs like never, rarely, infrequently, etc. 3. Classmate Interviews This activity is useful for new classes where the students aren't too familiar with one another. Set up your students in pairs and have them ask each other about their families, hobbies and interests using the questions you like. And what do you like to do in your spare time? After a certain amount of time, have each student introduce their partner to the whole class. Here, they practice using the simple past in the third person singular saying things like Bobby likes to play football in his spare time. 4. ESP, Extraordinary Sensory Perceptions Sensory observations are always expressed using the simple present. Therefore, have your students observe their surroundings, at school or at home, and have them take notes. Hereby it's important for them to use and describe all five senses, sight, hearing, feel, touch and taste. 5. Where am I? Similar to the previous activity, students are encouraged to use all five senses to describe a place they would like to be in. They make five statements or more describing that place to the rest of the class. The other students must then guess the place. This is also a great opportunity to review the uses of that, on and in when describing places. 6. Present Simple Bingo Mingle For this type of bingo game to work, brainstorm a list of get to know you questions with your students and write them on the board. For example, do you like to listen to music? Do you drive a car? Do you play the violin? Next, give each student a 5x5 grid whereby the center square is blank. The students then fill in the questions from the board into the remaining squares on the sheet. When done, the students mingle around the classroom and ask each classmate one of the questions. If someone answers yes, they write down his or her name into that square. The first person with five names in a row wins. 7. Weekend Party This is a great activity to play before the weekend. Ask your students what they usually do on the weekend. Have them share their routines with the class. If you like, you can even have them write up a paragraph about their ideal weekend and then read it aloud to the rest of the class. Are you ready to teach English abroad? These seven activities for teaching the simple present for the ESL classroom are ideal to help your students understand the structure and usage of the simple present tense. Speak with an ITTT advisor today to put together your personal plan for teaching English abroad. Send us an email or call us toll free at 1-800-490-0531 to speak with an ITTT advisor today.