🎥 Explorers: The Class Alibi Game
A fully interactive A2.2 Kids speaking lesson that turns the past continuous into a whole-class alibi game. Explorer Club masters become detectives and suspects, asking and answering what everyone was doing at a past moment. The language focus has three blocks: Past Continuous: The Moment Machine (was/were + verb-ing, with was/were formula chips and a time-signals panel — at 8 o'clock, at that time, all evening, then, last night), Ask Like a Detective (What were you doing? questions, short answers Yes I was / No I wasn't, and wasn't/weren't negatives), and The Alibi Toolkit (a five-row question-and-answer table for the cross-examination). Ten detective words (alibi, suspect, detective, witness, cross-examine, crime, prove, evidence, innocent, guilty) appear in a scrollable table with kid-friendly definitions and examples, and six get review flashcards. The reading is a 130-word Case File — The Missing Cookies — where Detective Mia cross-examines Team Compass, checks the alibis, and finds from the crumbs that Leo was guilty, with eight hover-tooltip words. Practice offers eight contextualised fill-in-the-blank items (was, were, wasn't, -ing forms and a lesson word) with live green/red validation, hints and a running score. Speaking gives five cross-examination prompts and a model six-line dialogue where Mia catches the liar. The writing task asks learners to write their own alibi in 30–50 words with a four-point checklist and a live word counter with auto-save. A full eight-question quiz blends past continuous grammar (was/were, questions, negatives, short answers) with two reading-comprehension questions, offering a progress bar, per-question explanations, a result circle and localStorage persistence.
Lesson Plan
- 4 detective questions about what people were doing at a past time
- Silent thinking or pair-share format — no writing required
Key Vocabulary
Grammar Points
- Past continuous: was/were + verb-ing for actions in progress at a past moment
- was for I/he/she; were for you/we/they (I was reading; they were playing)
- Questions: What were you doing at four o'clock?
- Short answers: Were you cooking? — Yes, I was / No, I wasn't
- Negatives: wasn't and weren't + -ing (she wasn't sleeping; we weren't talking)
- Time signals: at 8 o'clock, at that time, all evening, then, last night