Lesson overview:
Ask a B1 student to tell a story and you usually get a list: I went, I saw, I left. Correct, but flat. Narrative tenses are how English adds depth: what was going on in the background, what happened, and what had already happened before that. This worksheet teaches them with a true story told out of order. In 1915 Shackleton's ship Endurance was crushed by Antarctic ice and sank; in March 2022 an underwater robot found it 3,008 metres down. The 2022 scenes keep reaching back to 1915 with had, so students number six events in the order they really happened and work out the past perfect's job for themselves. A diagram draws the three tenses as layers of the sea, from the scene at the surface to had + past participle on the seabed. When we got to the cinema, the film started / was starting / had started shows how one verb changes the ending. A box of linking words (while, as soon as, by the time) and a short note on had been + -ing complete the guide. The exercises build from labelling verbs to a multiple-choice story, an open cloze and a 60 to 80 word story ending with a self-check list. The teacher copy adds answers, an example ending and a scripted presentation.
