Ten lessons that build the present simple out of what pupils already do every day, from waking before dawn to sweeping the compound at dusk.
The present simple is usually the first tense a pupil meets and the one they get wrong for longest, because it is taught as a table to memorise rather than as a way of describing a life. These ten lessons start from the pupils own day. They already know the sequence of it perfectly; the English is added to something they can picture without translating.
Each lesson introduces one narrow piece: first person statements, then third person and the s ending, then negatives, then questions, then the frequency words that make the tense useful. Every lesson ends with pupils saying or writing true sentences about themselves, which means their answers cannot be copied from a neighbour.
The third person s is given three full lessons because it is the single most persistent error at this level. The approach is not to explain the rule again but to make pupils hear the missing sound, using a listening game that works in a noisy room.
Lesson one is entirely verbs. Pupils who are still hunting for the word for sweep cannot also attend to whether it needs an s. Do not shorten this lesson.
Every practice sentence should be one the pupil could honestly say about themselves or someone in the room. Invented sentences about invented people are the fastest route to mechanical answers.
Mark it with the class, out loud, and count how many pupils made each error. The pattern tells you which of the ten lessons to repeat.
A complete unit on asking questions in English, built for classes where the teacher has a blackboard and the pupils have an exercise book and nothing else.
Nine lessons that build the past simple and past continuous out of pupils own memories, with a bank of irregular verbs organised by sound rather than by list.