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PASSIVE VOICE
Present & Past

Quiz Master: Passive Voice — a whole grammar lesson, clicked through in order

Not a quiz with a grammar label on it. This is a full lesson in three movements, and the app walks through it in forty-seven controlled steps that go forwards and backwards. First a guessing game where clues appear one at a time. Then a guided presentation of the present and past passive. Then a scored quiz round: four categories — Daily Routines, Yesterday & History, Animal Rescue, Mystery Box — with sixteen questions worth 20 to 50 points.

The step control is the reason this works on a smartboard

Every reveal is a separate step, and every step can be undone. A clue box appears; a tap opens its text; another tap brings the next box. That means you can slow down when a class is lost and go back when someone arrives late or asks a question, without scrolling through a slide deck to find your place. Forty-seven steps sounds fussy until you have taught a grammar point to a room that needed you to repeat the second example.

Clues before rules

The opening guessing game exists so the structure is met before it is named. Students see evidence, guess, and get it wrong or right — and only then does the presentation explain what they have been looking at. A rule delivered to a class that has already tried to work it out lands differently from one delivered cold. If you are short of time, cut questions from the quiz, not clues from the warm-up.

The quiz questions are production, not recognition

Each item gives a sentence with a gap and a verb in brackets: The smartboard ______ (use) in every lesson, My bedroom ______ (not / clean) by my mom. The student has to build the form, not pick it from options. The point values rise from 20 to 50 as the transformations get harder — negatives, past forms, agents — so a team choosing a 50-point question is choosing the difficult one knowingly.

Why passive voice needs a context to live in

Taught as a transformation drill, the passive is a rule students can apply and will never use. The categories here supply reasons for it to exist: a rescue story where the animal matters more than the rescuer, a mystery where the agent is deliberately hidden, history where nobody remembers who did it. Ask the class why each sentence is passive rather than active, and the grammar acquires a purpose beyond the exercise.

Run the quiz in teams with the answers hidden

The scoring only does its job if teams must commit before anything is revealed. Let them confer in English, take the answer, then reveal. When it is wrong, ask the other team to correct it rather than correcting it yourself — explaining why is used and not are used is harder and more useful than producing the form in the first place.

Level and exam relevance

A2 to B1 for the present passive, B1 to B2 once the past forms arrive. One lesson, roughly forty-five minutes with a class that discusses. The passive appears in every major exam syllabus at B1 and above, and in the reading sections long before students are asked to produce it — which is a good argument to give a class that wonders why they are learning it.

Goes well with

Further reading

Smartboard Games in ESL — what the big screen is good for
Gamification in Language Learning — why scoring changes behaviour

  WARM-UP — GUESS MY NAME

WHO AM I? 🤔

CLUE 1 🧂

"It is usually white. It looks exactly like salt."

CLUE 2 🍰

"It tastes very sweet. We use it to make cakes and cookies."

CLUE 3

"Some people put it in their tea or coffee."

SUGAR 🍬
MR. ŞEKER! 🎉

  THE MAGIC POST-IT

✏️ YOUR NAME

1Write your name at the top center of your Post-it.
2Stick it on your chest so everyone can see it.
3Keep it safe — you have a secret mission at the end! 🕵️
⚠️ Do NOT lose it!

  MEET TOSBIK

🐢
TOSBIK
"What does he eat every day?"
Every day, he IS FED lettuce. 🥬
"Last weekend his water was dirty. What did I do?"
His tank WAS CLEANED last weekend. 🧹
"He was sick last month. Where did he go?"
He WAS TAKEN to the vet. 🏥
✅ Great job! Now let's discover the rules of Passive Voice!
FOCUS: Active vs. Passive
👨‍🏫🐢
Mr. Şeker feeds Tosbik.
🐢🥬
Tosbik is fed.
PRESENT PASSIVE
I
clean
the tank
every week.
The tank
is cleaned
every week.
am / is / are + Verb 3
PAST PASSIVE
I
took
Tosbik
to the vet.
Tosbik
was taken
to the vet.
was / were + Verb 3
WHO DID IT? (The "By" Phrase)
🧑‍⚕️🐢
Tosbik was examined by the vet.
(We use "by" when we want to say WHO did the action.)
CONCEPT CHECK
1. The classroom floors ________ (clean) every evening.
2. The first email ________ (send) in 1971.
3. Millions of emails ________ (send) every day.
4. America ________ (discover) by Columbus in 1492.
5. A lot of electricity ________ (use) by televisions.

QUIZ MASTER

PASSIVE VOICE EDITION

📢

REMINDER

To win points, you MUST read the whole sentence out loud!

CATEGORY
15
20 POINTS

...

HOW TO PLAY
1Setup: Name your teams.
2Select: Pick a tile. Harder questions = More points.
3Steal: If Team A misses, Team B gets 15 seconds to steal!

  THE SECRET MISSION!

✏️ YOUR NAME

"My room is cleaned every weekend."
1Take your name tag (Post-it).
2Write ONE true Passive Voice sentence about your life right below your name.
3Stick it on the exit door as you leave! 🚪