The past perfect
Overview
In this intermediate lesson, students will explore the past perfect tense, focusing on its grammar and function within narrative contexts. They will learn how we use it to describe actions that have been completed before other past events, an essential tool for telling stories and illustrating sequences of events.
The lesson plan begins with suggested boardwork to introduce the past perfect tense. Following this, students will engage in several low-resource classroom activities consisting of collaborative grammar exercises and speaking tasks. These are designed to give students ample practice using the past perfect in various scenarios, thus reinforcing their understanding. To end the lesson, we have included a fun classroom game as an enjoyable and interactive way to review the tense and ensure a memorable learning experience.
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Lesson Outline
Classroom activities
Use of the board
The students learn the grammar and function of this useful narrative tense.
Add the example statement and elicit its meaning from your students. Then, have them help you place the actions on the timeline. When you feel they have a grasp on basic sentences, review statements containing time modifiers. Again, use timelines to confirm that your students understand the sequence of events.
Sentence builder
Students work individually to make past perfect statements from sentence fragments.
It's all in the past
A pairwork writing activity where students modify an existing statement to use the target language for the lesson.
Aftermath
For this group writing activity, students will use the past perfect to describe a scene after an event has taken place.
Classroom games
Hot seat: Past perfect
Players have to describe a past perfect sentence to their teammate in the hot seat.
More intermediate ESL lesson plans
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750+ Low-prep classroom activity ideas
1100+ Printable ESL flashcards
180+ ESL lesson plans
8 Distinct language levels
Offline access through the TEFLHandbook app
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