51ºÚÁÏ

A set of five games of Connect 4 for ESL students to practise building the affirmative, negative and question forms of verbs in various tenses:

• Basic verbs: 36 of the most common verbs in English, for beginners to practise Present Simple;
• Past Simple: I’ve included a game which only uses regular verbs and two games with only irregular verbs;
• Present Perfect: both action and non-action verbs.

Each game comes both as a PowerPoint, to play in teams, and as a pdf, to be printed out for pairwork.

I’ve included a short list of tips to make the game easier or more difficult, and alternative ways to play.

How to play
Students choose a symbol - I have included a yellow star and a red star in the PowerPoint slides - and try to place their symbol on 4 consecutive cells (horizontally, vertically, or diagonally). In order to be allowed to place a symbol, students must make a correct sentence with the verb in the cell they choose. The first student / team who manages to do so is the winner. If they make mistakes, they lose their chance to place their symbol and it’s the other team’s turn. This means strategy is not enough: even a team with three symbols in a row could make a mistake and give the other team a chance to block them.