What were you doing this morning?

Inna | Jul 06, 2026Jul 06, 2026

LESSON OVERVIEW

The main objectives of this ESL lesson on Past Continuous are to:

• talk about everyday workplace activities and habits;
• practise the Past Continuous tense;
• watch a short video about a woman’s workday;
• role-play conversations between a manager and an employee.

In this lesson, students examine and discuss photos, share their experiences and work with short dialogues. They analyse Past Continuous rules and use, practise the structure and work in pairs. Students ask and answer each other’s questions, watch a video about a woman’s day at work and talk about their workday habits. They also role-play manager-employee conversations using Past Continuous.

WARM-UP AND GRAMMAR

This ESL lesson on Past Continuous starts with a warm-up. Students look at photos of people at work, discuss what they are doing and relate it to their own experiences. Afterwards, they read dialogues showing workplace small talk and match them with the pictures from the previous task. Following that, students examine examples of the Past Continuous tense from the previous exercise (e.g. I wasn’t checking my phone). They then analyse the rules, structure and use of the Past Continuous tense. Moving on, students complete sentences with the Past Continuous forms of verbs. After that, they work in pairs. Students choose four points (e.g. at 9 a.m.) and take turns to say what they were and weren’t doing yesterday. They ask their partner a follow-up question after each point.

VIDEO AND ROLE-PLAY

In this part of this ESL lesson on Past Continuous, students watch a video about a woman’s day at work and say how many work tasks she did. Afterwards, they watch the video again and match times with images of actions. Then, students use this information to say what the woman in the video was doing. Following that, they discuss questions about their experiences with workday focus and break routines. Finally, students get cards and work in pairs. They role-play a conversation between a manager and an employee using Past Continuous. The manager asks what the employee was doing at different times. The employee answers, ensuring the manager understands that all activities were work-related. They then swap roles.

HOMEWORK/REVISION

This ESL lesson on Past Continuous also includes an additional task that you can use as homework or revision. In the task, students correct the mistakes in sentences in the Past Continuous tense. They then complete the second line in dialogues. The task is available in the teacher’s version of the worksheet. You can print it and hand it out to your students. It’s also included in the e-lesson plan.

WORKSHEETS

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