7/28/2019 How to Teach the Verb to Be to Begginers

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How to Teach the Verb "To Be" to

Beginners

The verb “to be” is the first verb students learn in their English studies. 

It is used extensively in the English language and will allow students to create

simple sentences with the vocabulary they have learned to date.

How To Proceed 

1Warm up 

For this first lesson, it is best to focus on only the I, You, He/She/It

structures which you can build upon in later classes. If students have not

really done a lot of activities with the words he, she, and it, you may want to

consider simply using names in the practice activities. Once you have

determined what you would like to cover in the first lesson, use the warm up

activity to review the vocabulary students will need later on in the lesson.

 A short simple drill activity would be ideal.

2Introduce Vocabulary 

During the introduction section of your lesson, introduce any new vocabulary

you plan to use in this lesson. Some emotions and adjectives would be good

because students will then be able to form complete meaningful sentences.

Introduce words such as happy and sad if students have not yet learned

them. Use flashcards to drill vocabulary and have students complete some

simple worksheet activities for further practice.

3Introduce “to be” 

Show students how to make sentences such as “I am happy. You are happy.

Jenny is happy.” Ensure that students understand how the subject and forms

of the verb are paired. You can practice this before introducing the full

sentence structure you would like students to learn. Call on students to make

sentences choosing a subject, verb, and adjective from columns on the board.

Without introducing the question form “Is she happy?” you can use such

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questions to test comprehension and students should understand what you

are asking. Have them answer by saying “Yes, she is happy.” so that they

continue to practice saying the target structure.

4Practice Simple 

You can use worksheets for practice. Have students complete a fill in the

blank exercise where they must choose am, is, or are to complete sentences

to ensure that they understand which form of the verb agrees with certain

subjects. You can also have students match sentences with images or with

translations for practice and to test comprehension. As a class check theanswers before continuing on.

5Practice Complex 

Students can then complete an activity such as Battleship for further 

practice. You can adapt this classic game for use in the classroom. While

it can be time consuming to explain, especially to beginners, your students willenjoy playing and it can be used to practice a wide variety of topics. To play

Battleship students should work in pairs using a worksheet. For this class, the

grids on the worksheet might have I, You, He, She, Jenny, Ms. Smith in the

first column and happy, fun, from Korea, sad, silly, from America in the first

row. Students then practice sentences such as “I am silly.” to try to locate and

sink all of their opponents ships first. There may not be enough time in the first

lesson to begin this activity but devoting the second lesson entirely to

Battleship would give your students lots of speaking practice. For a third

class, introduce the question that goes along with this target structure andhave students play using the same worksheet but by making questions such

as “Is Ms. Smith from America?” The really great thing about this activity is

that students essentially have to speak in order to play whereas with board

games students may be tempted to simply roll the dice and move their pieces

around the board without really practicing English.

6Review 

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 As a general review activity you can divide students into groups and play

Hangman with sentences or words from their textbook. It is perhaps not

appropriate to play the original game in your classroom so you can just adapt

it so that no one actually hangs. One adaptation is to simply have a very large

fish where when students guess incorrectly, a little fish gets closer and closer to being eaten. This is not very accurate as you can either draw the game out

or end it whenever you choose. Another method of playing is to assign a point

value to certain things. For example, if a group guesses the letter a and there

are three in the sentence, the group would get three points. A correct guess of 

the entire sentence would be five points while there should be a penalty for 

guessing the entire phrase incorrectly but no penalty for guessing a letter that

is not used. You can alter the scoring anyway you would like to make it more

appropriate for your class.

Once your students are quite confident with making the sentences practiced

in this lesson, you should include the plural we, you, they as well. As the first

verb they study, “to be” is very important for your students and it is essential

to get them to understand that the form of the verb is affected by the subject

of the sentence.