Teaching irregular verbs can be fun. The verbs are easy to use to tell stories and stories are interesting for everyone. In the following post I am going to tell a story and you can learn the past tense of ten irregular verbs there. ADVERT: [showmyads] To achieve this there are a video, a worksheet,…
I have already published a post on Present simple and continuous tense here. However, as my teaching situation changed I realize that I need a slightly different type of materials and a bit more of them. So in this post I add the following materials: a Song, Speaking exercise, graphical explanation of the usage of…
I have changed jobs and now I teach at elementary school. And even though I think that I am an experienced teacher I have never taught students with actual learning problems. Now I do, and I face real challenges. For example, this week I taught the verb HAVE GOT from the Project 1 textbook, and…
As the word WAS is the ninth and WERE the 34th most frequent word in English it is crucial to use them correctly. You simply cannot avoid using these words, and if you make mistakes in these two words, people will think that you cannot speak English. For teachers it is important to teach this…
SVOMPT rule is one of the most important rules in English. If students learn to follow this rule, their English will improve dramatically, and they will be understood. Once a student knows some words and follows the SVOMPT rule, we can say that he/she can speak English. ADVERT: [showmyads] I love Darren Crown’s explanation of…
Our most popular post is about questions with HOW. There is another post on all the WH question words. In this post I would like to deal with the questions starting with the word WHAT. To help you with this grammar there is a mind map and two games. ADVERT: [showmyads] The mind map shows…
In this post I would like to teach you how to use the words DESPITE, IN SPITE OF, ALTHOUGH, EVEN THOUGH, BECAUSE OF and BECAUSE correctly. I will explain the meaning of the words and the grammar. To help you with this there are two games, a mind map, a video explanation and a graphical…
Hope, want and would like belong into the group of verbs which are followed by the infinitive. If you click the link above you can see a complete solution for these verbs for intermediate learners of English. In this post we would like to teach how to use only the three verbs HOPE, WANT and…
When students hear the phrase indirect questions, they get scared. But actually this is one of the easiest grammar points in English. The only thing you have to watch out for is that if a sentence starts with a certain phrase (Do you know or Could you tell me etc.) you have to use the…
This is another post in my series of simple grammar explanations for elementary and beginner learners of English. In this post I try to explain the usage of the possessive ‘s and ‘. There is a mind map and several exercises to check the students’ understanding of the grammar. ADVERT: [showmyads] If you think you…
Students often use the wrong prepositions. So I have created this post in hope that this short explanation and practise will help them get at least some of the prepositions correct. ADVERT [showmyads] Many teachers claim that students use prepositions incorrectly because of interference from their mother tongue. It is true in many cases but…
Recently I have published a post on giving advice. And our post on modal verbs won the British Council blog award. This post will deal with three ways to express the modal verb SHOULD. The different means are HAD BETTER and OUGHT TO. Both of these have the same meaning as SHOULD. This grammar point…
First conditional is very similar to time clauses. However, I would say that first conditional is easier than time clauses. First conditional is used if we speak about two possibilities in the future. After the conjunction IF we use present simple tense and in the other clause we use WILL. You can see the explanation…
There are many ways to speak about future in English. We have already dealt with two ways here. In the first blog we tried to distinguish between Will and MAY and Might on the basis of certainty that an event will happen. ADVERT: [showmyads] In this post I would like to demonstrate the difference between…
I remember struggling with this grammar when I was at secondary school. As it is possible to translate the words IF and WITH with the same word in my mother tongue I couldn’t see the difference in English. ADVERT: [showmyads] To help my students avoid this problem I have created the following mind map and…
This is one of the easiest grammar points for the Czech students because in their mother tongue there exists a structure which is similar to infinitive of purpose. Because of this, I am not going to spend too much time and energy on this grammar point. Advert: [showmyads] There is just a mind map explaining…
Last week I was teaching past perfect in one of my classes and suddenly one of the students exclaimed: “Finally we are learning something new.” And by new she meant useful as well. I am not sure how useful this tense might be for people who want to speak English but it is certainly very…
This morning I was preparing a presentation for one of my classes on separable and not separable phrasal verbs and suddenly an interesting pattern appeared. It seems that the fact that the particle is separable can be guessed according to the particle that is used. I am not sure whether it works all the time,…
To learn Passive voice it is necessary to know the past participles. If you do not know the past participles go to our post on Past participle and learn the irregular verbs first. Once you do not have any problems with past participles, it is time to learn the Passive voice in English. Passive voice…
Several weeks ago I published a post on Conditionals. In the post, I tried to cover all the conditionals in one mind map and I think that I succeeded.However, the post was unnecessarily complicated for lower level students. Therefore I created a simpler one for lower intermediate students who need to know only the second…