Present Simple

Teaching Present Simple Tense for Elementary students seems to be quite easy, but students can ask tricky questions that occasionally confuse even such talented teachers as you are :)

Usage

 The first thing you need to know about Present Simple (to explain it to your students) is that it has some general information or the action has some frequency.

General information

"The Moon goes around the Earth"
"Animals have instincts"

Present Simple action telsl us about some general truth or fact. We don't mean anything specific. Just some general stuff.

 Frequency

"Every day John starts with reading his favourite newspaper"
"Once a year whole our family gathers for celebrating Christmas together"

Here we can observe some frequency of the action. When we have some repeated actions we use Present Simple.

 Time expressions to use with Present Simple (which express frequency):

•  every hour, day, week, month, ,etc.
• always, usually, often, sometimes, rarely, seldom, hardly ever, never - they are called frequency adverbs.
• once, twice, etc.

Sequence of action

"First, we open the webpage, then register new account and download materials for free."

When we descibe actions or instructions in the order they usually happen, we use Present Simple Tense.

Timetables / schedules

"Our train leaves at 8:30 tomorrow!"

Train leaves every day. We are using it tomorrow, but the train has a timetable and goes according to some frequency. That's why we use Present Simple.

Formation

Typical English sentence has Subject and Verb. For short we use:

S + V

So basically if we have all neccessary information answering questions who? and what happens?, we can make a very simple sentence.

e.g. I read every day.

!!! Attention !!!

When we can replace our subject (S) with he, she, it - we must add -es to the verb (V).

"John plays soccer every weekend."

Rules for adding -(e)s  you can find here.

Here you can find supplementary material for the lesson:
Present Simple Diagram
Present Simple Worksheet