What did you do last weekend?

If ever there were a language teacher question, it's the one in the title of this post! Once students have spent some time getting LOTS of input and practice with past tense verb forms over a good few lessons, they can often cope with some somewhat unstructured conversation (a sort of semi-controlled practice, if you like). So on the Monday lesson, "What did you do last weekend?" is really not a bad starter question. How could it be exploited in different ways? Below are 10 that I have come up with. I bet you have others.

1. The simplest approach is just to ask the whole class the question and invite hands up. The pupil answers with a sentence or two and you can ask follow-up questions, looking for any opportunity for interesting content or humour.

Pupil: "I went to the cinema with my friends."

Teacher: "Ah! What did you see? Was it good? Did you go by bus? Did you have popcorn? I hate popcorn! I prefer chocolates. Do you like popcorn? Really?"

As one student is responding the others should be listening and you can quickly check this by asking someone ("cold-calling") what Student A did (moving from first to third person, therefore).

The nice thing here is how 'organically' the conversation can develop, with you controlling the level of language, providing opportunities for students to keep reusing simple verbs. It kind of feels like real conversation and can lead in interesting directions quite naturally.

Don't worry too much that only one person is speaking. For the others it's a chance to get more input. If you think the rest of the class won't pay attention, then try the next option.

2. A variation on the above. Choose a student to answer and tell the others in the class they have to make notes about what the first student did. Then elicit responses in the third person from the class. You can always write examples on the board. You would choose a more proficient student, which is fine, as it gives them a chance to be stretched and to shine.

3. Put students in pairs and give them 5 minutes to silently write down five sentences (in L1 or L2) about what they did last weekend. Then each partner has to guess what their partner did by asking yes/no questions. You'll need to model some second person singular verbs on the board first, in all likelihood.

With all these tasks you can model language on the board in some form, e.g. with a sentence frame or pairs of sentences translated.

4. Give one student a list of imaginary things they may have done last weekend. Make sure to include ones which are very likely, e.g. I watched TV, I played a computer game, I went out with my friends. Include some absurd ones, like I met Marcus Rashford in the park.

For each statement the student reads, the rest of the class writes down true or false, or maybe possible or impossible. Then find out from the original students how many of the things they actually did. The rest of the class can score their answers.

5. Before asking the class what they did last weekend. Read them a series of sentences describing what YOU did. Some will be true, some false. Make these as subtle or as obvious as you like, depending on the class and your relationship with them. Students have to guess correctly.

Then students can write a few notes about what they did, before sharing them with you or a partner. The advantage of you speaking first is that the class hears lots of past tense verbs modelled first.

By the way, as a listening task you can just talk about your weekend as the class takes notes in English, then feeds back what you had said.

6. "The first who can't speak is the loser". In this case, students work in pairs. Each partner must say a sentence about what they did in turn. The first who cannot utter a sentence is the loser. You can scaffold this for mixed ability classes by writing some verb chunks on the board, e.g. I ate, I went, I watched, I drank, I played.

7. As a fluency building task, write up some verb chunks on the board, as with the previous example, but this time each partner has to keep talking as longs as they can while they are timed by a partner. As a variation, you get students to give as many sentences as they can in, say, one minute or two minutes, while the partner both times and counts the number of sentences produced. This task encourages students to work at speed, retrieving language from memory as quickly as they can.

8. In pairs, students interview each other about they did last weekend and take down notes in the process. After each student has been interviewed the teacher can elicit third person answers from individual students.

9. Carry out a "find someone who" task. Give each student a list of weekend activities. Students stand up, mill around and interview people to see who did what. So they would ask: "Did you play football?" "Did you watch a movie?" "Dis you go out with your parents?" and so on.

After about ten minutes the pupils sit down and you elicit how many people they found who did each activity. This could lead into some general conversation. "Oh! Everyone watched a film?" "What film did you watch?"

10. This one is a bit of a stretch and allows to me to get to 10! If you have worked on negatives and want to practise these, just do an audiolingual-style drill. Tell the class you are going to ask them if they did certain things over the weekend. They always have to reply in the negative;

"Did you play tennis?" "No, I didn't play tennis." and so on.

All of the above provide plenty of comprehensible input, interaction and many repetitions of high frequency verbs chunks. The content is personalised to students, making it potentially of more interest. You also get to learn a bit about individual pupils, building relationships along the way.