Pigeon Impossible

Pigeon: Impossible from Lucas Martell on Vimeo.


This is one of my favourite videos for getting students to talk about the past simple and past continuous.  I usually play the whole thing from start to finish (it's a silent film) and then we talk about what we have watched and why it was so funny.

Then I tell the students that I want them to retell the story using past-tense and past-continuous verbs (worksheet attached below) and I check understanding for the verbs on the sheet.   After that, I play the video in 30-60second chunks and ask the students to write down what they saw - they have a limited time to do this, the goal being that they only write one or two sentences down per "stop".

Once they have finished doing this, I get them to share the stories with each other and I circulate as they talk in small groups, to check that they have used the past-simple and continuous correctly.

Worksheet:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HyTt7LvNqhejcFE6cQCrjLStGDc0dC1M-KDe6qwJihc/edit?usp=sharing

Note:
One of my blogging colleagues, Anne Hodgson, also wrote a fab lesson plan a few years back, on using this video to practice modal verbs, this is here: http://annehodgson.de/2010/02/22/pigeon-impossible/