Present Simple Fun

Here are some popular warmers, fillers of follow-ups and some ideas how to make them more fun with technology.

A day in a life of...
Aim: simple present practice, third person singular
Level: all levels
Time: 20-30 minutes
Preparation: It's a good idea to make assign students to make accounts on the sites that you are going to use before the lesson not to waste any time on that during the lesson.
Procedure:
Ask the students about their favourite object. It could be anything favourite hat, book, bag, shoes, their phone... It's a good idea to name them and assign gender. Make them think of the daily routines of their object and draw a mind map. Make it more fun by using Spicynodes. Here is an example: 

Now they are ready they can write their story. Encourage them to publish the story with Tackk. Here is an example:
Another variation of this would be practicing the stative verbs. Create word clouds of the stative verbs. Use Tagxedo and make let's say a hand print word cloud for the verbs related to senses, or a heart for the verbs related to sentiments and desires, a key for possession, and brain for verbs related to thinking and believing...
Make a list of some of students' personal belongings, and write a thing or two using the stative verbs. You can use Scrumblr for this activity. You can finish with writing a story or not. Here is an example:

My Fictional World
Aim: simple present practice, permanent actions
Level: all levels
Time: 10-20 minutes
Preparation: Flip the ted-ed lesson How to build a fictional world. Here is my flipped lesson
Procedure:
The students are about to create a fictional world for their book. 
First they need to watch a ted-ed video and find out what are the things they should think about.

Next they have to create their world and  the rules in it. They need to think of the shape of their world. If there is a sun or not, and if not how does it get sunlight. If there is there a moon or how many are there. Where do the suns and moons rise? Name the sides of your world. What's the weather like? How many seasons are there? Name your seasons. What are the people like? What do they eat or drink? Are there any plants or animals? What are they like?
Creating a fictional world they will need a tool where they can write and draw and upload images and share so I suggest an online white board Stoodle  

My Hero

Aim: simple present practice, habits
Level: all levels
Time: 20-30 minutes
Preparation:no preparation needed for this exercise
Procedure:
Students will create a character and decide on his/her age, hobbies, habits, occupation, family...
They can all work on one character or everyone can have his own hero. They will build a Fakebook page for their hero. But first they need a photo so I think FACEinHOLE would be great for this activity. 

Proverbs

Aim: simple present practice
Level: all levels
Time: 20-30 minutes
Preparation: Make sure you create a teacher account and students accounts on Storybird and prepare some proverbs
Procedure:
This is how I would do this but you can always print out halves of proverbs. I would create groups of students within a group at Edmodo  and distribute the halves of proverbs there. Now, every students will vote for his halves first-come first-served rule, of course.  I have created an account for each student on Storybird and they are familiar with the tool but even if it's their first time it's really simple. Every student has to choose art  he/she will use for his/her halves and after finishing everyone shares  their half story. Now they have to match the halves and finish the stories, but they won't be finishing their story but collaborate on every story they have the half for. Here is an example

Read the rest of the story here  

Colourful Poem
Aim: simple present practice, stative verbs
Level: all levels
Time: 20-30 minutes
Preparation: make sure the students have created an account at Audioboo before the lesson.

Procedure: The students are about to write a poem about colours and I think it's a good idea to first visit the Color in Motion site and watch the videos. That will give them ideas what to write about. Tell the students to choose a color. Now you can also learn how to name different shades. Look here. Once they have decided on a colour they are going to write about tell them that they should think about what this colour feels like, sounds like, smells like, tastes like and looks like. This is the outline of the poem

Title

________ feels like_________

________ sounds like_______

________ smells like _______

________tastes like ________

________ looks like________

You can use this generator but it's better if you could encourage them make audio recordings. I suggest Audioboo for this activity. And if you do use Audioboo your students will be able to leave audio comments to their classmates.

listen to ‘Colourful Poem’ on Audioboo