Ewa Górna
- Mar 21, 2019
- 3 min read

Tense Race! 🏇🏻🏇🏽🏇🏿 A new game to practise Present Simple and Present Continuous

Updated: Nov 3, 2019

I am so excited about this one 😃 The idea came to me on Monday and I pretty much disappeared for a couple of days. I honestly could not stop creating and perfecting this game to the extent of forgetting to plan lessons one day 😂 Four days later it's ready!!

Tense Race will help your students practise the Present Simple (PS) and the Present Continuous (PC) tenses. The idea is pretty simple but at the same time the game involves various small elements that make it quite exciting for the kids.

To play the game you'll need:

the board
4 (or more) counters
coloured dice
game cards
an hourglass or a stopwatch
QR code reading app
pens
paper
clipboards (optional)

So let's break it down: first, the board:

The aim of the game is to get from start to finish. The first player to do so wins. In order to move along the board players draw cards, which look like this:

The player needs to create a correct sentence from words provided. As you can see, students need to decide whether to use PS or PC. They need to know which time expressions go with which tense.

In order to decide what type of sentence to create (positive statement, negative statement or question) they roll the coloured dice. You can see on the board which colour means what. You can easily substitute coloured dice for a numbered one and assign each type of sentence to two different numbers.

The player's task in to WRITE the sentence down. He or she has 30 seconds to do that. The game in my classroom has a tiny hourglass to measure the time. You can simply count down or use a stopwatch on a mobile phone.

The mobile phone will come in handy anyway because the cards have the correct answers hidden on them in QR codes!! 😁 Students scan the codes to check if their answers are correct.

Now, if the answer was correct the player gets to go forward the amount of steps indicated on the card. If the answer was incorrect the player has to move backwards. They can only go as far back as the starting point of the game.

There are also special green squares on the board which say "double your steps". If the player lands on one of those they have to ... well ... double their steps 😅 So if they just got to go 1 step forward they take one more step; if they moved back 2 steps they have to move back two more steps.

There you go! Tense Race! I've counted and if my maths is correct even when moving forwards three steps at a time all the time, each student should get to create 19 different sentences.

To make my game even more attractive for my kids I bough fancy pens and clipboards at Flying Tiger to go with it.

I've also put the cards in a nice box, which I think is meant for keeping cigarettes in 😂

The cards in this version of the game are for practising Present Simple and Present Continuous but I already know that I will add Past Simple to them and will keep adding tenses as we learn them.

I'm in love with this game 😍 It's my little baby 😅