Your English Life

If you don’t know much about simple future then you should look at another post Future Tense: If you Give a Mouse a Cookie and at The English Pages explanation of simple future because you need to know the basics before you can learn the other future tenses: future progressive, future perfect, and future perfect progressive. In the future, there will be posts about these other future tenses, but until then, please check The English Page’s Verb Page to find out more about these three tenses.

Once you know a little about the tenses, their forms, and their uses, it’s time to practice!

Have some fun playing Future Tenses Practice Jeopardy!

All you have to do is

1. select the number of teams (1 if it’s just you), and click “Go Play.”

2. You’ll see 5 categories:

-The Same Thing Tomorrow 1, 2, and 3 – For these categories you need to change the past sentence into a future sentence.

-By the year____ - In this category, you need to pick a year in the future. You will see a topic. You need to make a sentence about that topic and the year that you picked (e.g. By the year 2050, there will have been several large earthquakes in California.)

-Making Sentences – You will get several words or groups of words, and you need to make a sentence using a future tense.

3. Choose a point value under the category you want to try.

4. The last two categories let you be creative. That means there is not one right answer, but you can see possible answers by clicking “Answer” and compare them to your answer. You can do a lot with simple future, but try using some of the other future tenses for practice.

5. After you look at the answer, click “Adjust Scores” to give yourself some points. It always feels good to get a reward for your hard work!

6. “Home” will take you back to select another category and point value. Repeat until you’re done.

How did you do? Leave a comment with your score after you finished the game so that we can compare. You can also leave a comment in order to (1) ask a question about something you didn’t understand or (2) share one of your creative sentences from the last two categories. That way, you can see if your unique sentence was correct or not.

Wondering why some words are highlighted? Read about the AWL.

First, watch the video of the well-known children’s book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Pay special attention to the verbs in each sentence.

Form

As you watched the video and listened to the story, you probably noticed four verb forms:

• Simple present: base verb (+s)

  Example: looks

• Simple future with will: will + base verb

  Example: ‘ll ask (contraction of will ask)

• Simple future with be going to: be going to + base verb

  Example: ‘s going to ask (contraction of is going to ask)

• There are also sentences that use modals of possibility which are formed like will: modal + base verb

  Example: might notice

Watch the video again and find one more example of each form.

Show Examples

Use

Why is the book mostly in the future tense? The first sentence of the book is a conditional sentence (and so is the last sentence). The condition is “If you give a mouse a cookie…” If you do this, what will happen next? The rest of the book gives guesses about what might happen next. It makes a lot of predictions about possibilities.

So we can use simple future with “will” and “be going to” to make predictions about the future.

Make some predictions using simple future tense. Practice using simple future with “will” and simple future with “be going to.” What will the world be like in 10 years? What will be different? What will be the same? Is anything going to be better than it is now? Is anything going to be worse than it is now?

NOTE: Go to the grammar page for additional information about conditional and future (coming soon).