Last Sunday afternoon, Kevin wanted to find out what his friends were doing at three o'clock. He picked up his phone and called David first. "Hey, what were you doing at three yesterday?" he asked. David laughed and said, "I was playing basketball at the park with my brother. We were running and shouting the whole time. It was really fun!"
Kevin then sent a message to his classmate Amy. She replied in a few minutes. "I was studying for the math test," she wrote. "My mom was sitting next to me and helping me with the hard problems. We were working on it for nearly two hours." Kevin felt a little guilty when he read this. He had forgotten all about the test.
Their classmate Tony had the funniest story. He was washing his dog in the yard when it suddenly started to rain. His dog got scared and jumped out of the tub. Tony chased after it and got very wet. At that time, his mom was cooking dinner in the kitchen. She heard Tony shouting outside and came out to help him catch the dog.
Kevin himself was at home that afternoon, too. He was watching a TV show about animals in the living room. Because he was sitting far from the window, he did not notice the rain at all. When the show ended, he walked to the window and saw that the street was already wet.
The next morning at school, the four friends shared their stories. They laughed when they realized how different their Sunday afternoons were. "Past progressive is really useful," Kevin said. "It helps us describe exactly what we were doing at a certain moment in the past."