Learning the past simple: silly stories with common verbs

A series of funny stories to help young learners understand, remember and use the most common English verbs in context.

Many of the children I teach remembered only a limited range of English verbs and used fewer still, so I created a project to help expand their vocabulary It's a way of regularly exposing them to an increasing range of verbs in context without them getting bored.

Step 1 - initial drill

This PowerPoint (click to open) has 20 common verbs (10 regular/10 irregular) represented by images and activities to memorise the past and present forms with drills, matching exercises and games.

• Print and cut out the pictures and word cards from slides 5-6 (one set per group of 2-4 students).

• Get the students to match the images to the verbs in past and present.

• Ask them why some images have a star (the pictures with a star are regular)

• Use slides 2-3 of the PowerPoint to check/drill the vocabulary. (see image below).

Use slides 2&3 to check and drill the verbs. Click the image to reveal the infinitive, then click the word to reveal the past form.

Once groups have successfully matched the cards, get students to turn over the word cards and test each other until they have memorised the majority.

Additional practice

In this game, the blue team have won by making sentences with fell, played and wanted.

Display Slide 5 and split students into 3 groups.

Each group has to make a sentence to "win" a square. For example, they say "I saw a cat" to win the top left square or "I fell down" to win the bottom left square.

The winning team is the first to make a line of 3.

Once students have played as a class, you can give out boards printed from slides 8-9 and get them to play in groups of 2 or 3, to maximise speaking practice. (When students play in pairs, making a line of 4 rather than 3 often works best)

Step 2 seeing verbs in context.

This PowerPoint (click to open) has a series of stories about my students. Just make a copy and change the names in green to your own students' names and tell your class a new one every week.

As you read the story, elicit each word represented by an image and click to reveal,

My students have enjoyed the stories and become much better and using the different verbs as a result. My next step will be to get my students to write stories using the verbs and I'll turn them into visual books too.