To do or to be doing , that is the question !

A full class this morning in a rather narrow room - which makes it tricky to squeeze past and listen for mistakes or good bits during spoken pairwork. We were reviewing present simple and present continuous and when to use which. I put the first names of 6 of my friends and family members on the board and got them to ask these 3 questions for each:

Who is ........... ?

What do they do ?

What are they doing now ?


so the answers included THE PRESENT SIMPLE AND THE PRESENT CONTINUOUS:

He is my husband.

He is a driving instructor.

He is probably still sleeping right now as it is only 10am !

They then thought of 6 of their own friends or family and asked each other the 3 questions. This was a good opportunity for spoken work and practice of the tenses.

We also listened to a CD conversation of two people meeting each other again after some time and catching up with each other's news. It included lots of phrases like : So do I , Me too , Me neither. The class then prepared some questions to ask each other about various topics - home, daily routine, interests etc and practised asking these, paying particular attention to the tenses and responding to one another using those phrases.

We then prepared a written piece of work - an email written to an old friend they had just recently got into contact with again ( via Facebook ) giving their news and asking about their friend. This also gave practice of the tenses: What are you doing now ? I'm studying at Mayflower college etc. All the students worked carefully and diligently on this and I went round helping with grammar and spelling. When I got to student O's work, I found that rather than asking for news from and giving news to his old friend, he filled the whole email with insults about how the friend ( an ex-girlfriend ) had obviously changed since he last saw her, as the photo on Facebook shows her now "with a face falling down like rabbits ears" etc !

The afternoon's lesson was with a higher level class and we did describing objects in detail and then having conversations at the lost property office to find their lost belongings. They enjoyed this task and learnt and used quite a lot of new vocabulary. After the afternoon break I descibed a scene for them to draw, then after comparing the different pictures drawn, they listened to a description of a journey on the CD, and imagined the scene in their mind's eye. They enjoyed relaxing, closing their eyes and using their imaginations for this. They then wrote their own description of a short journey for others to listen to and imagine, and this worked really well as they produced some really nice descriptive passages with lots of adjectives and other vocabulary, and enjoyed listening to each other's and imagining themselves on the various journeys.