Present contiuous tense and sentence structure

[yan]

Please advise whether the usage of present contiuous tense is correct:

There are two children watching television programmes.



Please advise whether the sentence structure and punctuation is correct:

Two children are watching television programmes, three children are playing chess and one child is reading a book.

[philo2009]

Both of your sentences are correctly written. Note, however, that the first sentence is not an instance of the present continuous (a.k.a. present progressive) tense-form: the main VP (are) is present simple, and the subsequent 'watching' functions merely to introduce an adjectival postmodifier to the complement (children).