If things had been different…

If things had been different, they wouldn’t be the same. That’s the best way to sum up the past/present mixed conditional for your students. But they’ll need more practice than that! That’s why we’ve got this handy mixed conditionals group activity. The worksheet is divided into two sections. On the left there are the first half of the “What if?” questions which nominate a subject. The second half on the right side of the worksheet give some ideas for how things could have been different. You can come up with your own way to perform this activity, but here is a good one.

Give your students a short time limit to pair a few sentence halves together. They can write these down on pieces of paper, or put them in the chat. When everyone has done so, draw, or choose at random, one of their sentences and read it aloud to the class. Give students a bit of thinking time, and then have them answer the question one at a time. Think about correcting students as they go along or letting students correct each other. This activity is marked as a mixed conditional activity because students should be able to use the past/present mixed conditional to talk about how the present wouldn’t be the same if something in the past had been different. You could also try to complicate things by forcing students to use the third conditional.

Students can then vote on the best, the funniest, etc. for each alternate universe.

Alternate Universe Board Game