Buzz
Understanding verb tenses is crucial in mastering English. Being proficient at conveying time in both written and spoken forms is essential for engaging in conversations with a coherent timeline. Teaching the past tense, which indicates actions or events that occurred in the past, is instrumental in enhancing your students' language abilities.
Key Steps
Introduction to Past Tense
Present Tense Illustration Commence by refreshing your students' memory on the present tense, which represents actions happening at the moment. Provide them with various examples from their daily routines where they utilize the present tense.
- Use instances like, “I am walking home,” “She is working,” “We are making cookies.”
Helpful Hint: You can also touch upon future tense if it has been previously introduced, but avoid overwhelming your students with excessive information all at once.
Highlight the Contrast with Simple Past Tense. Utilize the same examples to provide your students with an overview of the past tense. Display the altered versions of your examples on the board to firmly establish the concept in their minds.
- Transform your examples into, “I walked home,” “She worked,” “We made cookies.”
Stress the Verb Transformation from Present to Past Tense. Draw attention to the verbs in each sentence by underlining them, indicating the changing aspect of the sentence. If you believe your students grasp the concept, you can encourage them to underline the verbs themselves.
- ”I walked home,” “She worked,” “We made cookies.”
Clarify the Distinction between Regular and Irregular Verbs. While conversing in the past tense, most regular verbs conclude with -ed. However, irregular verbs terminate in various ways and may require additional study. For ESL students or those encountering past tense for the first time, furnish them with a compilation of common irregular verbs to aid in memorization.
- Common irregular past tense verbs encompass: spoke, went, saw, drank, ate, had, and came.
Introduction to Continuous Past Tense. Continuous past tense delineates an action that occurred in the past but is expressed as ongoing. Inform your students that continuous past tense typically combines the past tense of “to be” with a verb ending in -ing.
- An illustration of continuous past tense is, “I was walking.”
- Continuous past tense is also referred to as past progressive tense.
Explore the Perfect Past Tense. Perfect past tense elucidates an action that was already concluded before another event occurred. Inform your students that it often combines the past tense of “to have” with the past participle of the verb.
- An instance of perfect past tense is “I had walked.”
- Reserve concepts like continuous and perfect past tense for more advanced students, such as those at the high school level or above.
Engaging Activities for Teaching Past Tense
Prompting Recollection of Past Events. Encourage your students to reminisce about past occurrences using the past tense. Circulate the room and inquire about what they dined on yesterday or their weekend activities. Document their responses on the board, emphasizing the verb to underscore the use of past tense.
- Students might share, “I ate spaghetti,” “We went to the park,” “I had a grilled cheese sandwich,” “We visited my grandma.”
- This exercise aids in integrating past tense into conversational practice.
Utilize Verb Cards for Sentence Creation. Divide your students into groups of four and distribute sets of expression and verb cards. Challenge each player to construct sentences using their verb cards to complement the expression cards. If the sentence is plausible, they discard their verb card; if not, they retain the card and try again in their next turn.
- The objective is to be the first to dispose of all verb cards.
- Create expression cards like “an hour ago,” “this morning,” “yesterday,” “last week,” “last year,” and “in 2013.”
- Include verbs such as “be,” “have,” “go,” “take,” and “start.”
Encourage Students to Invent Excuses for Tardiness. Instruct students to concoct excuses for arriving late to school. Prompt them to complete the statement “sorry I’m late” while using past tense to describe the morning’s occurrences that caused their tardiness.
- They can offer explanations like, “I was walking my dog,” “I missed the bus,” “I overslept,” “I felt tired.”
Encourage Peer Interaction about Weekend Activities. Compile a set of questions on the board for students to pose to each other. Pair them off and allocate about 5 minutes for questioning before rotating pairs.
- Include sample inquiries like, “How was your weekend?” “What did you do?” “Where did you go?” “Who were you with?”
- Reiterate the use of past tense in responses.
Insight: This exercise facilitates students' application of the past tense in conversational settings.
Construct Sentences Based on Time and Date. Jot down various hourly times on 12 slips of paper. Fold them and have students randomly select a card with a time. Utilize the structure “Yesterday at (time) I was (verb).”
- For instance, a student might say, “Yesterday at 6 am, I was sleeping.” “Yesterday at 3 pm, I was working.” “Yesterday at 7 pm, I was eating.”
Useful Tips
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Remain receptive to inquiries from students, particularly if they encounter confusion.
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Emphasize the transition of verbs from present to past tense.
