Using "going to" in English classes for 8º Ano
The structure is straightforward on paper: subject + am/is/are + going to + base verb. Students memorize it, fill out the worksheet, and move on. Most of them can form affirmative sentences without trouble. The problems start when the exercises get mixed. I've graded more than a few worksheets where kids wrote "She going to study" or "I am going to plays football." These are predictable errors, but they're frustratingly persistent. The contraction issue is another one — students will write "She's going to" in one sentence and then "She is going to" in the next, sometimes in the same paragraph. They don't always realize these are interchangeable, and teachers tend to not correct it consistently either.
exercises going to 8th grade pdf
There are plenty of free PDFs available online. Brazilian education sites like BNCC-aligned repositories, Escola Brasil, and teacher-shared folders on Google Drive have collections that fit the 8º ano curriculum. The ones worth using are usually the ones that separate affirmative, negative, and interrogative forms into different sections, because mixing everything at once tends to confuse students who are still building the pattern in their head. One thing most PDFs don't address well: the difference between "going to" for plans and "going to" for predictions based on evidence. Your textbook might say both use the same structure, which is technically true, but the practical distinction matters for reading comprehension. I had a student who confidently answered "Look at those clouds — it is going to rain" as incorrect because the exercise only had "planned actions" as the expected context. The answer key was wrong, not the student.
How to actually work with these exercises
Start with transformation drills. Give students a sentence in simple future with "will" and ask them to convert it to "going to," or vice versa. This forces them to notice the structural difference: "will" stays as one word after the subject, while "going to" requires the conjugated form of "to be" plus the phrase itself. That's where most mistakes happen — dropping the auxiliary verb entirely. Negative and interrogative forms come next. These are where theauxiliary inversion creates confusion. "Are you going to play?" takes some repetition before it sticks. I usually have students write ten questions each, switching between "you," "he," "she," and "they," because the verb "to be" changes form and that's an extra layer of processing they need to work through.
Short answers are another weak spot. Students will write "Yes, I going to" instead of "Yes, I am." They hear "going to" as the main verb and forget that "am/is/are" is doing the grammatical heavy lifting. Drilling short answers separately for about ten minutes before moving into full paragraphs makes a noticeable difference.
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What the PDFs usually get wrong
A lot of free downloadable exercises reuse the same contexts: weather, weekend plans, career ambitions. That repetition is fine for beginners, but by the third or fourth worksheet, students are mechanically filling in blanks without actually processing the grammar. They've stopped reading the prompt and started pattern-matching based on the previous exercise. Some PDFs also include "going to" alongside present continuous for future meaning without explaining the overlap. Both "I am going to travel" and "I am traveling" can express future plans, and the distinction is mostly about degree of certainty and prior arrangement. This nuance rarely appears in 8º ano materials, but it comes up later and causes confusion when students encounter it unexpectedly.
There's also the issue of spoken vs. written form. "Going to" becomes "gonna" in informal speech, and while textbooks don't always mention this, students will hear it everywhere. I've had conversations where students asked why native speakers say "gonna" if the grammar rule says "going to." It's worth addressing directly rather than letting it create doubt about what they've learned.
A practical workaround for difficult exercises
When a worksheet has too many mixed forms in one section, I split it. Students complete only the affirmative transformations first, check their answers, then move to negatives, then questions. Working through each type in isolation reduces the cognitive load. It takes longer but the accuracy rate jumps significantly compared to doing everything at once. Another approach that works: have students create their own exercises. Give them five prompts and ask them to write the affirmative, negative, and interrogative versions for each. When they produce the grammar themselves, they catch errors that passive completion hides. I've seen this take a class from roughly 60% accuracy on a standard worksheet to around 85% on self-generated exercises, though it requires more class time upfront.
Limits of this approach
The "going to" structure only covers part of future tense expression. Students will still need "will" for spontaneous decisions, promises, and predictions without evidence, plus present continuous for arranged futures. If the PDF you're using focuses exclusively on "going to," that's a gap they'll hit soon after. It's a narrow window of the bigger picture. Also, not all PDFs align with the BNCC competencies for 8º ano. Some are imported from American or British sources and use different terminology or exercise formats that don't match what Brazilian students are evaluated on. Always check the objectives section if one is provided, or skim a few pages to verify the difficulty level before distributing to a class.
If you're looking for a solid starting point, search for "exercícios going to 8 ano pdf" on sites like Plataforma BNCC, Saber Activity, or the English Way library. Those tend to be more aligned with the curriculum than random downloads from unverified sources.
