Teaching to be verb

Effective ESL "To Be" Verbs Lesson Plan With Worksheets & Helpful Strategies

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In this article:

• Tips for Teaching TO BE VERBS: Am, Is, Are
• Activity Ideas
• Free TO BE VERBS Lesson Pack with Printable Worksheets and Activities

When you’re done with this article, you’ll have a solid plan for getting your English Learners using their be-verbs correctly and fluently.

Most native speakers don’t have to worry about using be-verbs correctly and it can be hard to understand what’s so difficult about using “am,” “is,” and “are” correctly.

For an English language learner who did not grow up in an English environment, verb conjugation can throw them off.

Honestly…

It’s not that be-verbs are difficult to understand. That’s the easy part.

The difficult part is practicing them until they can say them without having to think about it.

That is why…

…we need to create lots of opportunities for our students to hear and practice speaking correct English grammar.

That means we need to cut down on the time we spend explaining concepts to students and increase the time they spend interacting with the language, just parents don’t spend a lot of time explaining grammar to their toddlers. 

All Kid-Inspired materials are designed with this goal: to get students using the language so much that they end up using it naturally, without having to think about it.

We want each and every student…

We want each and every student hearing and saying loads of our target language objectives each class until they can say them without even having to think about it.

If you need more help…

If you need more help with how to organize your classes to get your students using the language as much as possible, check out my book Kid-Inspired Teacher where I lay out a framework for how to organize your classes to make them both effective and engaging.

Because there are a few types of be-verb sentences, it’s important to choose one type and focus on it until students have gotten familiar with it.

• Be-verbs with Adjectives
• Be-verbs with Singular Nouns
• Be-Verbs with Plural Nouns
• Negative Be-Verbs
• Be-Verb Questions

Very often, the most difficult part of be-verb sentences is the articles and the plurals that go in the latter part of the sentences.

For instance, a student may get the be verb right in a sentence but forget to add the “a” before the noun that follows, or forget to add the “s” to make the noun that follows plural. Check out the examples below.

• She is a girl.
• They are girls. 

The following lesson ideas cover listening, speaking, reading and writing, all 4 language domains.  

In this article, I’ve only been discussing the present tense be-verbs, but the lesson ideas work equally well with the past tense be verbs.

Here is an overview of how you can teach be-verbs to your students whether you’re in the classroom or online.

• Write example sentences on the board.
• Have students extrapolate the rules from the example sentences inductively. You can call them grammar detectives to make it exciting and mysterious! Click here for more on inductive learning.
• Practice quick response. I say a subject, the class calls out the correct be-verb. 
• Put them in groups of 3. One student calls out a subject, the other 2 race to say the correct be-verb. The winner gets a points counter (bean, token, point on a whiteboard, ect) and also gets to call out the next subject.
• If they are responding quickly with the correct be-verbs, practice with asking and answering basic be-verb questions. You may want to stick with only adjectives, or only nouns at first to make things a little less overwhelming, especially for beginners.
• Give students a challenge to ask and answer 5 be-verb questions about a picture without mistakes. When they’re ready, they answer the questions with you. If they pass, they can go write those sentences. If they don’t pass, they practice some more first and try again.
• Once they pass, and while they are waiting for other students to finish, they can complete a fill-in-the-blanks worksheet where they identify the be-verbs in sentences or in a reading text. (If you’re a member of the ESL Curriculum Membership, present tense be-verbs are covered in depth in Beginners 4. Past tense be-verbs are covered in Low-Intermediate 2.  See below.)
• You can provide a reward board game for students who have completed all of the tasks.

Here are a couple of fun activities you can use to practice be-verbs with your students.

• Have students line up in a line facing you. 
• You assign actions for each be-verb: 1. Jump right for “is.” Jump right for “are.” Put your hands up and jump for “am.”
• Call out a subject.
• Students respond with the correct action while calling out the correct be-verb.
• After students have gotten the hang of the activity, you can add in a fun consequence for getting it wrong, like 10 jumping jacks. 

In this activity, you’ll need 1. Pictures of Animals  2. Flash Cards with adjectives Written or Pictured on Them.  3. Flash Cards with Be-Verbs on Them. If you’re a member of the ESL Curriculum Membership, click here to grab some resources for this activity.

• Students lay out the pictures and flash cards on their desks.
• They organize the pictures and flash cards into sentences describing the animals. 
• They share their sentences with each other.
• They draw a picture of an animal and write sentences describing it on a sheet of poster.

Check out the lesson pack below for ESL Worksheets and activities you can use with your students online or in the classroom. 

Everything you need for an engaging be-verbs lesson with your English learners. Click the button below to grab the lesson now.

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Sign up for the ESL Curriculum Membership and get access to 100s of engaging and effective lessons filled with speaking practice pages, reading passages, graphic organizers, anchor charts, printable games, flash cards and tons more

Love the be-verbs lesson? Leave me a comment below!

How To Introduce And Practice The Verb "To Be" To Beginners

The verb “To Be” is often the first verb students learn in their English syllabus. This verb allows the students to make simple sentences with the vocabulary they’ve already learned.

Here is a step-by-step lesson plan to introduce and practice the verb “To Be” to beginner English learners.

1. Review any adjectives or jobs stu­dents have already learned. E.g. hot, cold, well, teacher, student, tall, fat, etc.

2. Introduce any new vo­cabulary you plan to use in this lesson and students haven’t learned them yet such as happy, sad, etc.

3. Use flashcards to drill the vocabulary and worksheets for further vocabulary practice activities.

4. Make sentences such as “I am happy. You are happy. Jenny is happy.”

5. En­sure that students understand how the subject and forms of the verb are paired.

6. Make three columns on the board, the first for the subjects, the second for the verb “to be” and the third for the adjectives.

7. Call on students to make sentences by choosing a subject, verb, and an adjec­tive from the three columns on the board.

8. Ask questions such as “Is he happy?”, “Are you a student?  They will understand what you are asking without introducing questions with the verb “To Be”.

9. Elicit the positive answers from the students. Have them answer by saying “Yes, he is happy”, “Yes, I am a student” so that they practice saying the target structure.

10. Have students match sentences with im­ages or with translations of the sentences to test comprehension.

11. Using worksheets, have students fill in the blanks with “am, is, or are” to complete sen­tences to ensure that they understand which form of the verb agrees with certain subjects.

12. Working in pairs with a worksheet, students match a phrase from the first row (E.g. I, He is, She, I am, You, etc.) with the suitable one from the second row (E.g. am happy, sad, are good, is pretty, a student, etc.)

13. Introduce the ques­tion that goes along with this target structure saying “Is she pretty? Are you good? Are you a student?“. Elicit only yes-answers for this lesson to have students practice saying the verb “To Be”.

14. Focus on how to form the question.

15. Divide the students into pairs and encourage them to practice asking and answering questions using the target structure.

16. Once the students are quite confident with making sentences using the singular you, I, he and she, you should introduce the plural we, they and you.

17. Use a suitable game or song where the students practice the verb “To Be” and enjoy learning as well.

As it is the first verb students study, it is very important to get them to understand that the form of the verb is affected by the subject of the sentence.

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How to learn the verb to be for children of any age

If you have a child, start learning English with him now, childhood is a golden time for intuitive language acquisition! Where to begin? Of course, from the verb to be .

Children under the age of eight can easily learn a native language and speak without an accent. Later it is also possible, but with much more effort. You will have to delve into grammar, do exercises and master an unusual way to pronounce sounds. Today we will talk about how to learn English at different ages - starting with the smallest.

We will look at different teaching techniques for toddlers and exercises with the verb to be that you can do with mom or dad.

Someone will say: what exercises can be on to be if the child is five years old?

It is not necessary to tell your child that he conjugates the verb to be in Present Simple, exercises are not only what they write in a notebook, sitting without moving. In childhood, especially preschool, it is primarily a game. Children learn about the world through play. So let this world, as if by chance, include the English language!

But first of all, we ourselves need to remember what we want to teach in one way or another.

The verb to be is the word "to be". The difficulty is that in English it is inserted wherever possible, but in Russian it has long been forgotten about since the fifteenth century. Remember when in the film "Ivan Vasilyevich Changes His Profession", the tsar says:

Az I am king!

This is I am and there is our native verb to be . Now instead of kings there are presidents, and instead of there are - at best, a dash:

I am - president!

Let's move on to English. There, for the queen, and for ordinary people, and in general, for each person there is a form of the verb to be , and it SHOULD NOT be skipped.

Suppose you have to say the following phrase:

My dad - is the best.

One cannot take the obvious path and say:

My father - the best.

Something is missing, and it's a verb to be !

My father is the best.

The problem is that if you don't know in advance, you will never understand that is Words are outwardly dissimilar. This is how the verb to be looks like in different faces:

Short words I, you, she, it and so on are pronouns . They are called so because they occupy the place of nouns. That is, in order not to name a noun that is already known each time, you can put a pronoun in its place.

• Words denoting objects in the singular, such as: table, apple, house, computer, can be replaced by it .

If there is more than one item or person, replace them with they :

3 apples, 10 houses, a sister and a brother = they

Animals: beloved pet and almost family member, we call he or she .

If the animal is not domestic or its gender is unknown, we use the neuter pronoun - it .

All this information is needed in order to correctly combine pronouns and to be , according to gender and number.

For example, you want to say "the book is boring."

the book - the book

Boring - boring

Just say :

The book boring

- will not work.

We need to ask ourselves a couple of questions. 1) Is the book in the singular? Yes, we are talking about the same book. 2) Is the book an object? - Yes.

In this case, instead of the word book , we substitute it - a pronoun for inanimate objects in the singular. And with the pronoun it is is .

It is interesting

The book is interesting

Or, say, a sentence in Russian sounds like

"Mom and dad are happy."

Mom and dad are two people, so the third person pronoun is needed in the plural - they . We look at the table: this pronoun corresponds to are .

They are happy.

Mother and father

Now that you are confident in your theoretical base (the tablet can be printed or rewritten to refer to it in case of uncertainty), you can start educating your children.

If adults can already gather themselves together and memorize the table when life forces, then children are completely useless.

Of course, you need to create strong associations in order to understand that am, are, is refer to one word - be , that they are all in the same bundle.

But in no case should a child be forced to sit and mumble the forms of the verb, while expecting them to be remembered. Dull repetition, even for adults, does not help much.

Need to link information to something beautiful, fun, exciting. What does your child like to do the most? Does he like to run, jump, or can he not be torn away from paints and pencils? Is he humming tunes he's heard recently? Depending on his preferences, we will choose the most suitable way for him to perceive information, activate the type of memory that works great from nature.

Linking speech and movement, we activate motor memory. If you sit passively at the table, only the desire to sleep is activated, isn't it?

So, here are the first fun exercises on to be for preschool and primary school children:

1. Steps

Find any safe ladder. Write on the steps with chalk forms of the verb to be .

Jump from one step to another, shouting loudly:

I am!
You are!
He is!
She is!
It is!
We are!
They are!

2. Rope

Jump rope, on each jump do the same as in the previous exercise.

3. Ball

The parent or someone else throws the ball while saying the pronoun, the child catches and says the appropriate form to be .

In principle, the movement can be anything - you can clap your hands, squat, lightly jump up and stomp your feet. There is only one condition here - the action must be repetitive (otherwise it will be too difficult to coordinate movements and speech), not be too complicated and energy-consuming.

If a child likes to draw...

• Draw everything that lies badly with verbs to be for different persons. Gouache, ink, felt-tip pens, crayons, pencils, and fingers dipped in paint.
• Sculpt small (or even large) is, are, am from plasticine and clay, bake pancakes in the form of these words.

Why do this? So the child creates visual images of letters and words. If he is a visual, this will later help in memorizing new vocabulary, and generally improve memory.

If the letters are crooked, incomprehensible and "wrong" in any sense of the word... Rejoice! There is a process of knowledge. There is no need to evaluate the result and adjust the classes to some standards. The main condition is that they should bring joy.

• If a child likes to sing, you can come up with a simple melody, or use an existing one, and sing all forms of the verb in a row. Any melody will do - if the child is musical, “There was a birch in the field” and “The little Christmas tree is cold in winter” will do.
• If you don’t feel like inventing it yourself, you can always turn on Youtube and find there specially invented songs for such purposes on the request “verb to be for kids songs” or “verb to be for children”.

You can play this game from time to time: point to different objects and people and name the pronoun ( he, she, they , etc.) and the verb to be for this pronoun.

For example, if you see computer , you need to say: It is;

A man and a woman are walking down the street - They are;

Rain outside the window — It is;

Dad on the sofa - He is;

Mom and I in the window reflection — We are;

My reflection — I am.

Sometimes parents sound the alarm: it seems that they studied English from early childhood, but went to school and forgot everything. In fact, the knowledge remains, but the skill of transferring knowledge to another context is not yet available. And the form of classes is now completely different - you need to sit for a long time, write something down, listen to something incomprehensible ...

The priority of play activity gradually disappears with age, but this does not mean that classes should become dry and purely theoretical. It is still useful to include tactile sensations, to paint everything in different colors. Singing sounds in a certain rhythm also helps a lot. These ways of tapping into your inner resources will work well all your life.

Cutting out cards with words is quite an exciting activity, it perfectly trains memory and develops logical thinking.

• We make beautiful cards. We write verbs on three of them:

am
are
is

On the rest - pronouns:

she
he
it
I
we
they
you

Now you need to arrange them so that

I matched am ,

you, they, we matched are,

he, she, it were opposite is.

Then we choose the colors, and paint each pair in its own color. For example, cards I and am green, you and are red and so on. Subsequently, these colors will help to quickly distribute the verbs into pronouns, this will consolidate the newly formed neural connections.

After a while, you can add nouns instead of pronouns, and you will already have other pairs:

Mother is (mother is)
Masha is (Masha is)
Brother and sister are (brother and sister are)

And the third step is adding cards with adjectives: happy, beautiful, funny, lucky, tired , cool and so on.

You will get full-fledged offers:

Mother is happy
Masha is beautiful
Brother and sister are tired

In most cases, it is not the full form “pronoun + verb to be” that is written and spoken, but an abbreviated one. You need to shorten the verb. The first letter "bites off" from it:

I am

you are (remove a from are ) = you're, and so on:

She is = she’s
He is = he’s
It is = it’s
We are = we’re
They are = they’re

Rewrite the following phrases so that they are shortened:

• We are little girls

• It is a computer (This is - computer)

• You are beautiful

• I am so happy

The book is not boring
The book is not boring

I am not happy

1. You are a student — You aren’t a student 9
3. He is my father
4. She is happy
5. I am tired