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Schedule for Teaching Tenses
Day Five - Six: The Future Tenses
- Go over the formulas for the future tense verbs [simple, continuous, perfect, perfect continuous]writing them down in a list along the left side of the board.
- Next begin a future tense story on the center of the board with the simple future. I usually prefer to write a short story that begins with "Ten years from now..." or continue the story from the previous class.
Ten years from now, Tom will be the president of McBurger.
- Ask students to tell you what else Tom will be doing at the same time he is the president. Choose a good suggestion and add it to the story.
Ten years from now, Tom will be the president of McBurger. He will be living in a big house on the edge of Burgerville.
- Ask students to tell you about something Tom will have done before this.
Ten years from now, Tom will be the president of McBurger. He will be living in a big house on the edge of Burgerville. He will have married Jane and will have had two kids.
- Finally, ask students to tell you about something else Tom will have been doing.
Ten years from now, Tom will be the president of McBurger. He will be living in a big house on the edge of Burgerville. He will have married Jane and will have had two kids. He will have been working at McBurger for many years.
- Just like in the past and present, at this point, draw a timeline and ask students to tell you where each tense should go along the line taking care to note that the future perfect and future perfect continuous happen before the simple future and future continuous. I usually also draw a line between the simple/continuous and perfect/perfect continuous formulas and label the first group: "Use these to talk about actions that will happen or will be happening in the future.", and the second group: "Use these to talk about actions that will happen or will be happening before the simple future or future continuous."
- *Special Note:The point of reference and before tenses concept in the future is the same as in the past and present, so students tend to have gotten it pretty well by this point.
- Since we primarily use the future tenses to predict events, a good practice exercise for the future tenses is to ask students to write a short paragraph describing what their life or the life of a classmate will be like ten or 20 years from now. Have them use each of the four future tenses at least twice in their paragraph, and also have them diagram their paragraph to check that they have used each tense correctly.
Day Five, Part Two:[or day six if time is short]
- Go over the formulas for making questions with the future tense verbs [simple, continuous, perfect, perfect continuous]writing them down in a list along the left side of the board leaving enough space between them to include examples.
- Do the same thing for the future tense negative formulas
- Ask students to make question sentences of their own using the formulas and to answer each question in the negative.
A variation on this could be to have them write down questions about their partner's future and their partner writes down their answers in the negative. Then switch roles and repeat.
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