These slides contain basic phrases and ideas to narrate past events in English.

1. Talking about past events
Exchange past personal information,
anecdotes, biographies.

2. • 1) action finished in the past
• I visited Berlin last week.
• 2) series of completed actions in the past
• First I got up, then I had breakfast

3. Simple Past
Time expressions
• Yesterday
• last week, year, month etc.
• a month ago
• in 2002

4. Read the following story.
• Yesterday Mrs. Hubbard had a very rough day.
• In the morning, she went to the kitchen and
looked in the cupboard for some food for her
dog, but the cupboard was empty.

5. • Her poor dog stared up at her with its hungry
eyes, and she knew she had to do something
quickly.

6. • She hurried to the grocery store to buy some
dog food, but unfortunately the store was out
of her dog's favorite brand, so she had to
catch a bus downtown..

7. • After buying the food, she waited for a half
hour in the rain to get a taxi. When she finally
got home, her dog was sound asleep on the
living room sofa.

8. Sentence connectors
• First
• First of all
• Then
• Next
• After that
• Besides
• Moreover
• Furthermore
• However
• Finally
Time expressions
• Yesterday
• A year ago
• Last week/Monday
• The other day
• Yesterday morning…

9. When you narrate events use:
• Past simple:
• When I saw the strange creature, I
screamed.
• Sally was scared so she got up and ran
away

10. Time linkers
• When
• While
• As
• As soon as
• Before
• After that
• During
• Later
• Soon
• At the beggining
• Finally

11. Expressions or phrases like:
• Once upon a time,
• All of a sudden/ suddenly,
• (un) fortunately,
• To my surprise,
• (un) luckily
• I couldn´t believe my eyes
• However,
• Besides,

12. References
• H.Q, Mitchell, (2010) On track 3 student´s book. MM Publications