Fun and games with the simple future! Noga tells us about a student-centered, entertaining way to have students practice their use of this verb tense!!
Hello everyone, my name is Noga Laor and I’m the Academic Director here at Rennert in NYC, and I’d like to share a game with you today that I used to use with my students when I was teaching, and it’s to practice the simple future; the simple future with “will” and the simple future with “be going to.” And the great thing about this activity is that it’s completely student-centered and 100% student generated as well. So, it’s called the simple future board game and here’s how it works: You break the students up into groups of 3 or 4 depending on how large your class is. And you give each student three little pieces of paper- just tiny little pieces of paper, and every student has to write a statement in the simple future on each piece of paper, on each piece of paper that he or she has, about their lives. It could be, it has to be true. It has to be a true statement. It could be a statement in the near future or in the far future. So, for example, “I’m going to have dinner with my family tonight.” Ok, or “I’ll travel to Europe next year,” anything like that. Once the students are done, they take their little pieces of paper, and they create a board game with it. So they put their little pieces of paper on the table in front of them. They mix them up, but they create a board game so it’s like 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4. And each group receives a die and some, some placeholders, some markers, let’s say a coin, a penny, a nickel, a dime. So, one person rolls the die- let’s say they get a 5. So they take their marker, and they go to the board game and they count or and they move 5 steps, so 1-2-3-4-5 and they land on the 5th little piece of paper and they pick it up and they read the sentence. If it’s a sentence that they wrote, they have to talk about their, this future plan for at least one minute and their classmates or their group mates can ask them questions. So, for example, if the statement is, “I’m going to have dinner with my family tonight,” they can say, “Yes, I’m going to have dinner with my family tonight, my mother will be there, my father will be there, my sister is coming and she’s bringing her friend. I think we’re going to have chicken and maybe pasta. So they just talk about the future plan for a minute. If they pick up a card that is another student’s sentence, they have to ask that student questions about their future plan. So, “What are you going to have for dinner tonight? Who’s going to be there? Do you have dinner with your family every week?” Things like that. So it really allows the students to practice making statements in the simple future and also asking questions in the simple future. Once they’re finished, that piece of paper gets taken out of the board game, the next person rolls the die, they move their marker however many steps the die tells them to move, and the game continues until all of the little pieces of paper on the board game are gone. So again, this is a really, really nice way to practice, to allow students to practice using the simple future in questions and in statements. And as I said, it’s completely student generated. The game itself is student generated and it’s completely student centered because the students are doing all of the work. It’s a great game. I hope you use it in your classes and I hope your students enjoy it. Thank you and good luck!
