Getting to know more about the past and present tense

Everyone knows there are two tenses in English: Past and Present. Present tense itself has four different ways of using and they are:

1. Present simple: I play.
2. Present continuous: I am playing.
3. Present perfect: I have played.
4. Present perfect continuous: I have been playing.

Are you starting to get confused? Don’t worry. We are learning only 1 of the uses and that is present simple. On top of that, not forgetting, our past tense too. In order to make learning about past and simple tense easier, we have a slider game for that. The same word but different tense were pasted on the stick and the kids will have to move the slider to the correct tense section. My 3 years old joined in the fun too. But mostly she just looked on and observed what her brother was doing.

After the slider game, we played with flashcards. No, I didn’t flashed the cards to them. What they need to do is to sort out the words between present and past. My boy was telling me he felt like fixing jigsaw puzzles.

While his sister was looking upon him, he grabbed his sister to sit with him and teaching her how to read each card and where to place them. *Sweet!*

We had a little game of reading and pairing (past and present) the cards after they were done sorting out.  At the same time, explaining to them why is it that not all words can be “transformed” to past tense in the same way. Do you know why? Because they are 2 different types of verbs: regular and irregular. Confuse again? Next, we have guessing game. They were shown a chart with different pictures. The kids will have to guess what the picture are showing and looked for the correct word to match it. Then, they have to find both past and present tense to be placed beside the picture. This game really got them engaged.

After all the hands on fun, we now have writing practice. The worksheets were divided into regular and irregular verbs and my boy will have to read and understand the sentence before deciding which is the answer (past? or present?).

Overall, the session was very simple and straightforward but the kids had a lot of fun guessing and matching the words and its tenses. Learning English tenses can seem difficult at first, but all you need to do is remember the sentence structures, and learn the rules.  😉

PS: We sell both hard and soft copies of the learning materials. If interested, do email us at youngsmarties@gmail.com