Your students can conjugate. They fill the gaps, they pass Friday's test, and then on Monday somebody says "Yesterday I go to the cinema" and you realise the rule never made it out of the exercise book.
That's the gap these ten activities are for. It closes when a student has to say something true about their own life at speaking speed, because that's the only moment the form has to arrive on its own instead of being looked up.
Each activity below has a level, a timing, and the language it practises, so you can pick what fits the class in front of you. Most need nothing but the board. And since plenty of these lessons happen over video now, each one has a note on making it work in an online room.
Short on prep time? There's a free printable set of 24 Past Simple speaking cards waiting at the end of this post.
Why Past Simple Is Harder Than It Looks
On paper it's one of the friendlier tenses. One form for every person, and a regular ending that covers most verbs. Students usually get it inside a lesson.
Then it falls apart in three specific places, and which one you're looking at should decide which activity you pick.
Irregular verbs have to be learned as vocabulary, not worked out from a rule. There are roughly a hundred that come up in ordinary speech. A student can have the pattern down cold and still stall on caught.
Questions and negatives need the auxiliary, and this is where otherwise fluent students slip. "What you did last night?" survives for years, because it communicates perfectly well and nobody wants to stop a good story to fix it.
Time expressions carry more of the meaning than people expect. A learner who has the verb form but not last week, two years ago or when I was little still sounds vague about when anything actually happened.
Speaking tasks are useful here because they hit all three at once, under time pressure, which is the condition the student will actually be speaking in.
Past Simple Activities for Beginners (A1-A2)
1. Yesterday, in Order
1of 10A1-A210 minSpeakingTime Expressions Students write five things they did yesterday, in any order, then read them to a partner who has to put them in sequence using first, then, after that and finally. The listener does the harder job, which takes the pressure off whichever of the pair is weaker. |
| Variation Ask for one invented item among the five and see if the partner catches it. |
| Online Students type their five items into the chat, then a partner reads them back in order. The typing buys quieter learners a moment to prepare. |
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2. Guess the Lie
2of 10A1-A210-15 minSpeakingListening Say three things about your own weekend, one of them false, and let the class guess. Then hand it over. At this level, keep it to three short sentences and accept single-verb answers. Going first yourself matters more than it sounds like it should. Students copy whatever model they just heard, so one clear demonstration in full sentences saves you two minutes of explaining. |
| Online Works unchanged. Collect votes with reactions or a quick poll. |
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3. Picture Sequence Stories
3of 10A1-A215 minSpeakingNarrative Order Show four unrelated images and ask a pair to invent the story that links them. The pictures hand them the content, so the only thing they have to supply is the grammar. At A1 that's the right split. |
| Variation Variation: Shuffle the order and ask a second pair to build a different story from the same four pictures. |
| Online Share your screen with the images, or drop them in the chat and send pairs to breakout rooms. |
| Full lesson Want this as a full lesson? From Pictures to Stories (A1-A2, 60 min) runs the same idea as a dictogloss: students reconstruct a story from AI-generated images and pick up sequencing words alongside the past forms. |
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4. Regular or Irregular
4of 10A1-A210 minPronunciationVerb Forms Call out infinitives, have students shout back the past form, and sort them into two columns on the board. Once the columns exist, group the irregulars by sound rather than alphabetically: bought, brought, thought together, sang, rang, drank together. Students stop guessing once they can hear the family. |
| Online Use the annotate tool on a shared whiteboard and let students drag the verbs into columns themselves. |
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5. The Alibi
5of 10A2-B120-25 minQuestion FormsFluency Two students step outside and agree, in detail, what they were doing together last night. They come back in one at a time and the class cross-examines each of them. Any contradiction convicts them. If you only run one activity from this list, run this one. The class physically can't interrogate anybody without producing question after question with did, so the grammar becomes necessary rather than requested. And because it's a game, nobody notices how much of it they're doing. One warning: it needs a group that's already comfortable with each other. Put two shy students in the chair in week one and it dies on the spot. Save it for a class that's found its feet. |
| Online Send the pair to a breakout room to agree their story, then bring them back one at a time while the other waits in a second room. |
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6. Find Out Why
6of 10A2-B115 minQuestion Forms Hand each student a slip with an odd fact about their partner. Your partner didn't sleep last night. Your partner missed a flight last year. They have to ask at least three questions to get the story, then report it back to the class in the third person. That reporting stage is the bit people skip, and it's where the practice doubles. Asking uses questions, reporting uses statements. |
| Online Send the slips privately in the chat so the partner can't see the prompt. |
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7. Chain Story
7of 10A2-B110-15 minSpeakingSequencing Give them an opening line with something at stake in it: It was 6am and the phone rang. Each student adds one sentence in the Past Simple, going round the group. Nobody gets to plan ahead. That's the point. |
| Variation Ban and then after the third turn and watch the connectors get more interesting out of necessity. |
| Online Go in the order shown on your screen and name the next speaker, so nobody talks over anybody. |
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8. The Interview
8of 10A2-B120 minQuestion FormsNote-taking Student A picks a memorable event from their own life. Student B gets five minutes and as many questions as they can fit in, then writes it up as a short news report. Then they swap. Because the reporter needs details to write anything, the questions keep coming without you having to ask for them. And the write-up gives you something concrete to correct once the talking is over. |
| Online Pairs work in breakout rooms, then paste their finished reports into the chat for everyone to read. |
| Full lesson If your group takes to this, Childhood Stories (A2-B1, 60 min) is built around exactly this kind of talk: eating toothpaste, losing the lyrics on stage, mistaking a stranger for your mum in the supermarket. |
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9. Where Were You When...?
9of 10B1-B215-20 minPast Simple vs Past Continuous Name a moment most of the class will remember and ask what everyone was doing when it happened. The answers split themselves into the two tenses on their own: the background goes in the continuous, the interruption in the simple. It's the cleanest way I know to teach that contrast, because students hear it in their own answers before anyone names a rule. |
| Online Works unchanged. Ask two or three students, then let the group compare in pairs. |
To push the contrast further, Ghost Stories (A2-B1, 60 min) does the same work through haunted houses and mysterious apparitions, with Past Simple and Past Continuous side by side. |
10. The Last Line First
10of 10B1-B220 minNarrativeCohesion Give them the final sentence of a story: and that's why I never borrowed his car again. Groups work backwards to invent everything that led up to it, then tell the whole thing forwards. Working in reverse forces real narrative planning instead of a chain of "and then", and it stretches a strong group that finds ordinary storytelling tasks too easy. |
| Online Breakout rooms with a shared document, so the group can draft the sequence before presenting. |
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Which Mistakes to Correct, and Which to Let Go
Speaking activities fall apart if you stop them too often, so decide before you start what you're actually listening for.
Correct the target language. Wrong past forms and missing auxiliaries are the whole point of the lesson:
"Yesterday I go to the shop" becomes "Yesterday I went to the shop"
"What you did last night?" becomes "What did you do last night?"
Let the rest go. Articles, prepositions and word choice aren't what the activity is practising. "I went to a airport" communicates fine. Make a note, come back to it afterwards, and let the student finish their story.
Stopping somebody mid-sentence to fix an article costs you the fluency the task was built to create. That trade is almost never worth making.
Free download: 24 Past Simple Speaking Cards
We turned four of these activities into a printable deck you can use tomorrow. Twenty-four cards in four types, so one set runs four different activities: open storytelling, question practice, spot the false statement, and group chain stories.
There's a one-page teacher's guide with how to run each type in 5, 10 or 25 minutes, and an on-screen version for online lessons. A4 and US Letter, cut lines included, and it reads fine in black and white.
Once the Past Simple is solid, these lesson plans take it further:
Also on the blog: 5 Engaging Role-Play Ideas to Practise Past Simple.
Explore the full library of ready-made lessons at esllaboratory.com.
