For some children, I can see twice a week and therefore I got asked to teach them tenses but in a fun and interactive way.
But first is the boring part recap from the last lesson to make sure they understood and remembered what adjectives and adverbs are. Once we have done this we move onto the definitions and examples of the different tenses. I got the children to write this down in their book so they have something to look back on if they get stuck later on in the lesson.
Once the children have written this down and I have been able to explain it we then start to have some fun. We first of all start with some interacting learning. We first of all started with some role-play with them acting out the action of what is happening in the future, present and past tense. For example for the future tense, we said I would go and eat breakfast so we all acted out us eating breakfast. We did this for all of the tenses and some different examples. This did get the whole class very excited but this was fine I had another game lined up after we had completed a ‘boring’ activity.
The next task I got the children to do was to come up and write down phases in the correct place. Some of them even did the acting of the action word which helped them rememeber it more. We made sure that these phrases were in the correct place with the happy or not happy game. If they were in the wrong place the children corrected it by moving that phase or they corrected that phase to the correct tense.
We then moved on to a game after the children were able to have more examples of the different tenses. This game was head, shoulders and knees. I would write a phase on the sentence the children would have to point to the body part that they think the tense is. I wrote the body part which represents the tense of the board so the children knew and I could remember! After we played this for a while I then got the children to still play head, shoulders and knees with the tenses but made them come and underline the tense word. This showed me that they understood what they needed to do.
The final part of the lesson was getting children to come up to the board and write out real-life examples of the tenses. The children had to tell me what tense it was in, then underline the tense to then make sure the tense was correct for what they said. This made sure that overall the children understood the different between the three tenses.
Here I was getting some of the children to come and write their sentences for the children to then play head, shoulder and knees. After we worked out the tense they then came and underlined the word which made it that tense.
I was getting the children to place the phrases I had written into the correct tense box.
This was at the end of the lesson where I got the children to write out tense sentences which are related to them.
This was another example of the children using their phases to then write them in the correct column.