Teacher Discussion Forums

My elementary and high school teachers made us memorize the past tense and past pariciple of more than fifty irregular verbs. Can you suggest other ways of teaching the past tense and past participle of irregular verbs?

Did you ever play "verb tennis"? The students play in pairs; the first student "serves" by saying the Base Form of a verb, the second student "returns" by saying the Past Simple form. The first student "returns" by saying the Past Participle. The second student continues by saying a new verb and so on. When a student makes a mistake, the other scores a point. Whoever scored 5 (or 10 or whatever) wins the game.

I think games make learning so much more fun for both children and adults. I've incorporated "BINGO" into my lessons and in fact, I was looking for a game to teach the past tense of irregular verbs not too long ago. Unfortunately, I could not find one, so I made one myself. If you have access to a computer and printer, it's really not very difficult because there is a website that will create the cards and you can print them for free. The site is: http://print-bingo.com/bingo-cards-custom.php

I call out the present tense of the verb and the students look for the past tense on their card. Of course, I go over the present and past prior to playing the game and depending on my students' level, ask them to try to find the answer from memory. I also try to get a few of my students to be the caller as well....gives them practice with pronunciation. Finally, when someone says BINGO....he/she is asked to read back each word and also make a sentence using the word.

I have also made a homonym game as well as a game of sight words for my lower levels.

Give it a try...it's fun!!!

I like to help my students (and I hope that they appreciate it) by telling them to study the irregular verbs not in the alphabetical order, but by putting them into groups (according to their structure or pronounciation in the past simple and part participle). E.g. write - wrote - written, ride - rode - ridden
tell told told, sell sold sold etc.

And sometimes, when I want to check their knowledge, I tell them to write a short spotcheck. The thing is I never want to make them worry and so I dictate them just the infinitive of verbs that are in the same "group". This means that they have a chance to write down also the verbs they might not know.