What are you doing now? (Present Continuous)

Kinga | Jul 20, 2025Feb 12, 2026

LESSON OVERVIEW

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

• practise Present Continuous to describe current actions;
• discuss what people are doing at the moment;
• describe photos by asking and answering questions.

Students talk about people in photos and explore the Present Continuous tense to say what people are doing right now. They practise forming questions, along with affirmative, negative and short answers. Students discuss what real people might be doing now and describe pictures. They also work in pairs and guess activities by asking questions to practise the target structure.

WARM-UP AND PRESENT CONTINUOUS

This ESL lesson on Present Continuous starts with a warm-up. Students look at photos of people and answer questions about who they are, where they are and how they feel. After that, they match the photos from the previous task with the things people in them are saying (e.g. This festival is amazing! Are you having fun, too?). Moving on, students look at sentences from the previous task and do exercises where they practise the form and use of Present Continuous. They then use prompts (e.g. what / my brother / do / now) to create questions in Present Continuous (e.g. What is my brother doing now?). Following that, students answer the questions using the information in brackets to create affirmative, negative and short answers. Next, they choose people from a list (e.g. your best friend, your favourite singer) and say what they think they are doing and aren’t doing now.

GRAMMAR PRACTICE AND DISCUSSION

In this part of this ESL lesson on Present Continuous, students describe photos of people doing different activities. They use two Present Continuous sentences. Afterwards, students look at sets of sentences (e.g. A big box; Fruit, water and hot meal; Yes, they are). They are answers to questions about the photos from the previous task. Students match the answers with the photos. They then create the questions for these answers. Following that, students work in pairs. Each of them gets a card with situations or activities (e.g. Students are having a geography lesson). Student A chooses one and describes what people are doing, without using the words in bold on the card. Student B asks questions and guesses the situation. They take turns until they guess all the activities on the cards.

HOMEWORK/REVISION

This ESL lesson on Present Continuous also includes an additional task that you can use as homework or revision. In the task, students correct the mistakes in sentences. They then choose two questions and answer them. 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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