50 Common Verbs: Practice Six Tenses and Three Forms

Some grammar activities are useful for one tense. This one is useful all year. 50 Common Verbs is a free sentence-building activity for practicing the most common English verbs across several tenses and three sentence forms. It opens with no account and no sign-up, so it is ready to use in class right away.

How the activity works

The activity starts with a grid of fifty common verbs, each shown with a photo and its base form: ask, build, buy, catch, drink, eat, make, play, read, write, and many more. Click a verb and it opens to a large classroom picture with a sentence builder beside it, and the sentence appears in color-coded chips: subject, auxiliary, verb, object or place, and time. Each verb has six pictures, so students meet different subjects and situations rather than one repeated pattern. Some pictures use singular subjects like he, she, or the boy; others use plural subjects like they, the people, or the children. Fifty verbs with six pictures each gives teachers three hundred prompts for speaking, review, writing, or homework.

Two levels of difficulty

The Basic level covers four core tenses: every week for present simple, right now for present continuous, yesterday for past simple, and tomorrow for future with will. The Advanced level adds two more: at some point for present perfect, and yesterday at 8 for past continuous. A teacher can start a class on the four basic tenses and come back later to add present perfect and past continuous without changing activities.

Positive, negative, and question forms

Each tense can also be practiced in three forms: positive, negative, and question. Choose past simple and negative, and students build "The boy didn't eat a sandwich yesterday." Choose present continuous and positive, and they see "The baby is sleeping in a crib right now." Because the picture stays the same while the sentence changes, students can focus on the grammar. This is often where the mistakes are: they know the tense but drop the auxiliary, reverse the word order, or keep the -ed after did.

Using it in class

Project the activity and ask students to say the sentence before you reveal it. Show the picture of children playing soccer and say "positive, past simple." Students answer:

The children played soccer yesterday.

Then say "make it a question":

Did the children play soccer yesterday?

Then say "now right now":

Are the children playing soccer right now?

In a few minutes the class has practiced tense, auxiliary verbs, word order, and subject-verb agreement from one picture. Mixed Review pulls different verbs into one set, which works as a warm-up or a closing round, since students have to keep adjusting the sentence instead of repeating a pattern.

The printable worksheet

The activity also includes a printable worksheet for written practice. Each prompt gives students a picture, the word chips, and a target tense and form, and students write the full sentence on the line. There are five sets of ten prompts, and you can print them, save them as PDF, or check against the on-screen answer key. Do a few examples together on screen first, then assign a set for independent writing, pair work, or homework.

Open the activity here