Past prepositions of time Snap card game

Teachers’ instructions

Photocopy and cut up the cards below so there is one pack per two or three students. As preparation for the game or as a grammar presentation, get each group of students to arrange their cards into 4 columns by the preposition used when we are talking about the past only (note that the “ago” expressions are used with “in” when talking about the future). Check their answers and elicit the different uses- “at” with clock times, “in” with longer times like months and years, “ago” with lengths of time like numbers of hours, “No preposition” with expressions starting or meaning “last” or “this”

Get the students to shuffle the cards up again, deal the cards between them and put their packs flat down on the table without looking at them. The students now play the traditional card game “Snap”- they take turns showing the top card from their pack, and if it takes the same preposition as the last one their partner turned over the first person to shout “Snap!” takes all the cards that had been turned over up to that point. The game continues until one person has all the cards, making them the winner. If anyone shouts “Snap” when the cards don’t match they have to give two cards from their pack to each of their partners as punishment.

 

As an additional activity, you can get students to put the cards into time order and tell a story with them.

IN	AGO	AT	NO Preposition
1955	80 years	7 o’clock	Last week
July	2 days	Two minutes past three	Last July
The summer	Two decades	Midday	Yesterday evening
The 1970’s	A week	Noon	Last night
The 60’s	One and a half hours	Midnight	Last Tuesday
The 19th century	Two and a half months	3 p.m	This morning
July last year	Ninety minutes	A quarter to seven	The day before yesterday
1999	Thirty seconds	4 o’clock in the afternoon	Last year
The year two thousand	Two thousand years	About two o’clock in the morning	This afternoon
1066	A few minutes	Exactly seven fifteen	Yesterday

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PDF for easy saving and printing: Past preps of time Snap card game

Related pages

Past tenses page

Prepositions page

Snap and pelmanism in EFL classes (TEFLtastic classics Part Seven)