Last week I taught passive and present perfect tense. I thought that I was well prepared but in both cases we encountered one big problem. The students could not form the past participles correctly. So they fought with the past participles and completely ignored the grammar taught. ADVERTISEMENT: [showmyads] So now I know that we…
The word “HOW” is one of the most productive words in English. It helps us create meaningful questions and sentences. The word “HOW” combines with many other words to create these questions. In this post I try to introduce the basic phrases “How much”, “How many”, “How often”, “How well”, “How long”, “How far” and…
I had been using these phrases long before I learnt that they were a grammar item. However, as I have to teach them to my students at school, I have created this short post. There is just a simple graphical presentation of the phrases and two games to practise them. To practise phrase there is…
In this post, I try to explain what countable and uncountable nouns are. When I speak with native speakers of English they often tell me that the concept of countability in English is absolutely natural. “You simply know which noun is countable and which is not.” However, this natural feeling is nearly impossible to teach….
This is quite a simple grammar point – adjectives with the endings ed or ing. The more annoying it is when students use the endings incorrectly. In this post you can find a mind map, two games and a BBC presentation on this topic. I hope it will work fine for you and that you will…
This will be quite a short post. But sometimes easy does it. So, I hope it will be the case. I would love to explain the usage and form of Used to here. To achieve this I have created the following mind map: Used to – mind map In this mind map I try to…
Many elementary students feel they cannot see the difference between these two tenses. To help them I have created a rap which explains the grammar and gives some example sentences, two mind maps explaining everything simply and several games to practise this grammar point. I hope you will find it useful. Present tenses – mind…
There are very few grammar points that I know so well as conditional sentences. Students always ask about them and they appear in tests and students. I have tried many times to explain this grammar, but I feel that I have always failed. I have created about 5 different presentations and three mind maps till…
Negative prefixes are very productive. It seems that if you learn these then you might be able to create countless English words. However, it is not enough to learn only the prefixes. As each word has its own prefix and there are just a few rules you have to learn the whole words. Knowing this,…
This material is a demonstration of the approach called CLIL. In CLIL You learn the content and thus you learn the language. However, experimenting a bit with the approach I like to do this a bit differently. First, I introduce the vocabulary through the mind map, then I present the text (this time in a…
Three days ago we were talking about presents with my students and I could hear that they were using the verbs buy,give, get etc. in a way that everyone would understand them but which was wrong. So, I created the following presentation and several exercises. What surprised me was that even after my presentation the…
In time clauses it is important to understand that you cannot use WILL after certain conjunctions, even though you are referring to the future. And that is the whole trick. If you do this (not will do this), your English will be fine. And that is what you need. Time clauses – mind map…
As there are no articles in my mother tongue, using them correctly in English is a real challenge. Like many other non-native speakers, I often leave them out or use one too many. And my students do this too. I have been thinking for years how to teach articles effectively and finally I feel that…
The concept of uncountability is very difficult to understand and use correctly for learners of English. However, even the English sometimes need to count the things which are uncountable. To do this they count the containers the things are commonly packed in or they have a countable expression which is used with the given noun….
A week ago I published a post on prepositions AT, IN, ON for time. Several students asked me if I could do something like that for prepositions AT, IN, ON but for places. So here you are. There is a mind map graphically explaining the usage of the prepositions and then there are 3 games…
Many students have problems with the prepositions AT, IN, ON. Prepositions are such small words with nearly the same meaning that it seems that you can use any of them. But that is not true. If you want to sound well, you have to be careful with the prepositions. And believe me, it is not…
Defining relative clauses are quite easy to understand and use. The name of the grammar sounds horrible but in fact you just need to know when you should use the words “which”, “that”, “who” and “whose”. I like teaching this piece of grammar as the students quickly get the idea and they are able to…
When I was preparing the lesson on Clothes I knew that at the same time the elementary students will have to learn the present continuous tense. And as I had a little time to spare I prepared the following activities for them to learn this grammar point. Present continuous tense Mind map Once again I…
I like teaching adverbs to students because it is very simple, there are only a few exceptions and you can see that they have learnt something immediately. Adverbs are an easy grammar point and students can use them in the same lesson and feel that they achieved something. ADVERT: [showmyads] Recently I have been experimenting…
My pre-intermediate students are confused by all the different verb patterns. So the last two weeks I spent designing a mind map that would help them. It is in no way a comprehensive description of the grammar, but I feel quite happy about it. Looking for some rules I discovered that the pattern verb +…