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Have you ever felt frustrated when teaching your children the irregular verbs? Have you ever felt that you teach and practice, but your learners don’t remember them? Well, during all these years working as an ESL and ESOL teacher, I have discovered some ways to teach, practice, and keep the irregular verbs alive in your learner’s long-term memory. Today, I want to share them with you.
1. Teach them in groups: There are some verb lists in which you can find the verbs organized based on their similarities; you can find many of these lists on the internet. By the way, I have two free irregular verbs games you can download They were created based on one of these internet lists.
2. Use them in meaningful sentences: When introducing each one of the groups, show the verbs in meaningful sentences. Create sentences using your students’ names as examples or ask them to think of funny sentences about their friends. They find this very exciting.
3. Use Spaced Repetition: Make sure you use spaced repetition to study them effectively. If you don’t know what “spaced repetition” is, make sure you read the following information I posted on my Instagram account.
4. Study them in a wide variety of ways: Remember, we have different types of learners and each one of them has their own learning preferences. As teachers of children, we must try to make multi-modal lessons. Here are some ideas, using art:
Songs
Games
Speaking activities
Role-plays
Pictures
Download a Mr. Morton past tense song here.
The following are some games you can play in class to practice each group of verbs:
A. Runners and Secretaries: To practice verb tenses, we’ll create a short paragraph with some verb forms missing. Follow these steps:
Divide your class into pairs.
Post the paragraph outside the classroom.
Ask your students to choose roles: one as the runner and the other as the secretary.
The runner will go outside, read, and memorize the first sentence. Then, they will return to their place to dictate this sentence to the secretary.
The secretary is responsible for writing down the dictated sentence.
Repeat steps 4 and 5 until the entire text is complete.
Once the text is fully written, the two students should fill in the missing verb forms with the correct tenses.
B. Heads and Tails:
Have your students sit in a circle and designate one as the head and the other as the tail.
Assign each student in the class one set of verb forms.
For example: Become – Became – Become
In a clockwise order, each student should say all three forms of their assigned verb and then call on another student by stating the verb that corresponds to them.
Student 1 says: “become – became – become” and then “write – wrote – written” to student 2.
Student 2 says: “write – wrote – written” and then “do – did – done” to student 3.
Student 3 says: “do – did – done” and then “read – read – read” to student 4, and so on.
The game continues in this manner until a student makes a mistake. When a student makes an error, they must stand up and move to the tail of the group, while the remaining students shift one place closer to the head.
Students who move to the tail of the group will receive a new set of verbs to respond to, providing them with practice for multiple verbs.
You can decide how long to continue the game based on the time available.
C. Sentence Race:
Divide your class into teams.
Provide each group with a marker and designate a specific area for them to write their answers, such as the whiteboard.
Instruct each group to take turns participating in the race. Ensure that the representatives from each group stand a considerable distance away from the writing surface.
Then, announce a sentence with an incorrect verb form. Once you utter the sentence, each representative from every group must run to the board and write the sentence.
The student who finishes first and writes the sentence correctly earns a point. Afterwards, the teacher should explain why the sentence is correct.
D. Listen and Correct:
The teacher prepares a list of sentences, including some with common verb mistakes made by the students.
Once the list is ready, the teacher reads one sentence aloud, and the students must respond by either standing up if the sentence is incorrect or remaining seated if the sentence is correct.
The teacher then selects a student to provide the correction if the sentence was wrong.
The game continues until all the sentences have been corrected. You can vary this game by playing hot potato. The selected student will listen to the sentences and attempt to correct them.
5. Use hands-on activities: Children are sensorial, and they love to touch and to make things with their hands. Using playdough is one way to make learning much more appealing to your children. Here are some fun activities to do with your students:
Cut and paste
Use playdough or clay
Sand writing
Painting
6. Create a word wall for reference: As you teach and practice the verbs, make sure you keep a common record on one of the classroom walls. You can place them in alphabetical order. You can download a free one by clicking the picture below.
7. Use digital games: Enhance your ESL and EFL classes, or differentiated instruction plans, by incorporating digital games into your teaching. A great and effective example of e-learning games you can use with groups, or for independent work, are BOOM CARDS. Click here to see some interesting decks and here to learn how they work.8. Create your own verb dictionaries: Allow your students to make their own Pictionary. You can even use the word wall set to do this amazing craft. They may add a cover page and their own sentences at the back of each verb as well. Click here if you want to download my word wall printable set.
9. Use fill-in-the-blanks dialogues: Design dialogues in which your learners have the chance to practice speaking while filling in the blanks with the correct verb forms. If you don’t have time to create such dialogues, I’m sure you already know that CHAT-GPT or any other AI can help you with this.
10. Peer Correction: If you want, you could also teach your learners how to correct their classmates’ incorrect conjugation, ensuring that your children learn about empathy and how to correct their classmates in a friendly way.
I hope that these tips help you with your future planning. Don’t forget to download all of my irregular verbs freebies!
8. Create your own verb dictionaries: Allow your students to make their own Pictionary. You can even use the word wall set to do this amazing craft. They may add a cover page and their own sentences at the back of each verb as well. Click here if you want to download my word wall printable set.
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