Zimasheet: Back from Vacation

Your beginners are back, or there’s a new group of them waiting for you after summer vacation. Coming back from vacation is such an easy lay-up for teachers to get their students to know each other. Everybody did something over the summer. Of course, putting strangers who are learning the basics of English into pairs and saying, “Talk about your vacation!” is a recipe for disaster. Or a symptom of laziness…

This little Zimasheet activity works like most of the others. Put students into pairs, have them come up with ten assumptions about each other’s vacation (written down!), then they share their assumptions with their partners to see how many were correct. Finally, partners will present each other’s vacations to the class based on what they learned. This particular Zimasheet activity focuses on irregular verbs at the A1 level along with summer vacation vocabulary.

I really like this activity because students get to talk about something fun and easy, practice irregular verbs in the past simple, negative past simple, and different subjects (I, you, he/she). Here you can see the evolution of the activity:

You swam in the ocean on vacation.

No, I didn’t. But I swam in a big lake in Italy.

My partner went to Italy and swam in a big lake this summer.