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Grade: Elementary
Subject: Language

#2251. Past Tense Verbs

Language, level: Elementary
Posted Sun May 13 20:25:02 PDT 2001 by Tania Yap (ytu_7@yahoo.com).
Singapore
Activity Time: 1 hour
Concepts Taught: Use of Past Tense Verbs

Objectives
Pupils should be able to
1. understand that verbs can tell about actions that happened in the past.
2. name past tense verbs when given present verbs

Strategies
Direct Teaching, Individual Activity and Group Activity

Context
In this lesson, pupils can practise sentence construction and apply their new knowledge through creative writing.

INTRODUCTION
Tuning-in:
1. Teacher gets a pupil to do a jumping action. Ask pupils to name the verb that he is acting out (jump). Write the verb on the board.
2. Do so for 4 other verbs: walk, kick, shout, laugh.
3. Teacher asks pupils to construct sentences using each of the verbs.
4. Teacher gets pupils to read the sentences.

DEVELOPMENT
PART ONE
Explaining Language Feature:
5. Teacher explains that the present tense is used when the action is done today or at the present moment. If the action was done yesterday or in the past, they have to use past tense.
6. Teacher tells pupils that past tense means adding 'ed' behind the verb.
Pupils response:
7. Teacher refers to the sentence constructed on the board and add 'ed' to the verb 'jump', and add in 'yesterday' to the sentence.
8. Teacher gets pupils to read the sentence.
9. Teacher asks pupils to change the other 4 sentences into past tense by doing likewise.

PART TWO
Explaining Language Feature:
10. Teacher explains that there are special words that change their spelling when they become past tense. Show a few examples: run-ran, see-saw, come-came, go-went.
11. Teacher gets pupils to construct sentences using these past tense verbs.
12. Teacher hands out a list of commonly used past tense verbs.

CONCLUSION
13. Pupils are to do varied individual work according to their abilities.
14. The high and middle ability pupils are to identify and edit present tense verbs into past tense verbs.
15. The low ability pupils are to match past tense verbs to their respective present tense verbs.

FOLLOW-UP ACTIVITY
16. Teacher arranges pupils into groups, distributing the different ability pupils.
17. Each group is to write a composition based on a given picture, using past tense.