Memorable moments

This is a great exercise to get students talking. They walk around the room, switching partners regularly and spend a good amount of time talking about one or two of the questions with each person.

These questions practice superlative adjectives – happiest, strangest, most disgusting – and two tenses, past and present perfect.

This is a good lesson for upper beginner (A2) students or above.

I find that with a class of about 16 students, it fills 30-60 minutes, depending on how talkative they are.

With a warm up covering adjectives and a review of past and past perfect tenses, this can easily fill a 90-120 minute class.

As a teacher, I tend to let conversations go, not worrying too much about grammar or correct vocabulary as I use this exercise in conversation classes. Of course, when students ask questions or want correction, I help them.

It does rely on students knowing past tense for answering the questions and present perfect tense for asking the questions. If you want to make this into a longer class, you can work on these tenses to begin with, using a text book.

Warm up

As a 10 minute warm up exercise, have the students shout out adjectives, about 20 is a good list. Then they should turn each of the adjectives into their superlative form. You can include the comparative form if you have time, and then highlight just the superlatives once the list is complete.

• happy – happier – happiest
• scary – scarier – scariest
• funny – funnier – funniest (I usually point out the difference between fun and funny)
• frustrating – more frustrating – most frustrating
• exciting – more exciting – most exciting
• good – better – best

The students then can start to practice questions by asking you, the teacher.

• What was the best holiday you have had?
• What was the worst class you have taught?
• What was the most delicious cake you have baked? (I love baking, so they always ask me this, and then ask for the recipe)
• What was the hardest exam you completed?

There are two versions of the handout, one for adult students and one for younger students. Both handouts are available to download for free from Patreon.

Students should come up with their own question before starting to talk to each other.

This lesson can get rather loud and full of laughter. The best conversations are when the students aren’t always checking themselves for correct grammar and vocabulary.