Lesson overview:
Most students can build both tenses. The trouble starts when one sentence needs both: *When I arrived, we had dinner* and *When I arrived, we were having dinner* look almost the same, but they tell different stories. This past simple vs past continuous worksheet starts with a real story. On 28 April 2025 the power went out across Spain and Portugal while Dimitrov and Fearnley were playing at the Madrid Open, and the match stopped in the middle of a game. Students read the story, answer six questions that lead them to the rule, and then see it on a timeline: a long bar for the action in progress, an X for the event that cut it off. Three more timelines show the other ways the tenses combine. A table of sentence pairs shows how one verb changes the meaning, followed by the past continuous in all its forms, when vs while, and the four mistakes students make most. Then come eight exercises, from sorting background and events to writing about the last time their own phone died.
