I’ve recently been teaching the past simple (both regular and irregular verbs in positive statements) to my class of nine-year-olds.  There’s been lots of gesturing behind me to show that we’re thinking about something which happened in the past and I’ve been trying to think of different ways to review, repeat and recycle the material.  This week we did quite a fun activity which allowed them to focus on both the meaning of the verbs and also the different pronunciation in the present and past – especially useful with a lot of the regular verbs and some irregulars, such as read (/red/).

To start with, I asked them to give me some of the verbs we’d been studying in their present and past forms.  Then, when we had about fifteen on the board, I asked them to give me a sentence for each, using the past form.

We did some drilling of the sentences to check pronunciation and then I put them into groups.  One student had to say a sentence and the others had to say whether it was in the past or present.  I monitored and corrected, especially the problem -ed endings!