Wanna know the best exercises for modals and the best way to teach modal auxiliaries? I’ve got you covered. In this post I will lay out for you how I teach the modal verbs and why I think the worksheets you should use need to be self-checking. Let me tell you how I teach the topic. If you don’t want to read all of this, you could also download my Great Grammar Lesson Road Map to see the perfect layout of any grammar lesson here.
I honestly love teaching modals. It’s a grammar point that is used so much in everyday speech, and a new user of English will come across modal auxiliaries all the time. Rules they must abide by in public places in English-speaking countries have them, and people will use them as they make recommendations and such too. So, it will be easy for students to understand the need to learn about them. So this is how to go about teaching modals.
What is modal auxiliaries teaching at its best?
Introduction exercises for modals
I start with an introduction to the topic. I ask students to make a list of all the rules they need to abide by at school and at home. What can they do, and what can’t they do? What should they do, and what shouldn’t they? I ask them to do this in groups so that they’ll come up with a lot of things, and I either use the placemat method for this, or I get them an A3 sheet of paper and they make a ‘rules list’.
Teach modal verbs
Then I teach the topic. I tell them modal verbs change or affect other verbs in a sentence; they help them. They are used to show the level of possibility, indicate ability, show obligation or give permission. Modal verbs behave differently to ‘ordinary’ verbs. The most common modal verbs are: will, would, should, could, may, can, shall, ought to, must, and might.
Possibility: might, shall, will –> I might/shall/will go to the party
Ability: can, could –> I can/could climb a tree.
Obligation: must, have to –> You must/have to be on time.
Advice: ought to, should –> You ought to/should stop smoking.
Permission: may, can, could –> May/Can/Could I go to the bathroom, please?
Practice
Once you have taught the topic and have checked that students have understood what you said, they need to practice what they’ve learned. The fastest way to do this is using some worksheets for it, or a textbook of some kind that you use for this. Students need exercises for modals to be filled in, for the right one to be chosen, or for errors in sentences to be corrected.
The best worksheets on modal verbs are fun
What’s really great for practicing the topic are worksheets for modal verbs that are fun! Students need to enjoy learning how to do something and part of that is making learning into a game, and you can do this by making a worksheet into a BOOM card deck or creating a pixel art mystery puzzle students need to solve for example. Or make the questions and answers into a dominoes game. You can have a lot of fun with it!
The best worksheets for modal verbs are self-checking
Self-checking modal verbs activities are amazing, and this works for exercises for modals especially! I don’t personally mind checking work with students, but if work can check itself then that can really save some time, it can help students stay focused on what they’re working on, and it can help them continue until they choose the right answer, which will also teach them a lot. It will really lighten the load overall, and what’s not to like about that?
So practice, practice, practice. Check my Great Grammar Lesson Road Map for some more ideas on what kinds of exercises you can give to students to get the hang of it.
Transfer activity for modal verbs
And once that is done, I always have an exercise in which students have to show what they’ve learned in a communicative way. They will either speak about something using the grammar point, or they will do a writing exercise. In the case of modal verbs, I will have them create the rules to their IDEAL WORLD. What rules would there be at school and at home, and anywhere else that they want to include? (Maybe the ice cream parlor must give everyone free ice cream once a week..) What can and can’t they do? Ask them to use all the modal verbs at least once. At the end, ask students to present their favorite rule from the list!
And that’s it, that’s how I teach modal auxiliaries! I hope you know how to do should would could exercises now, and will would exercises! You can easily set all of this up yourself, but if you don’t want to put it together on your own, I’ve got just the thing. I have created a complete lesson plan for the modals, with those fun worksheets and exercises I was talking about! Go check it out HERE.
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