Grade 8 · English · Tenses
Move the story from today to yesterday
An interactive activity on 12 verbs, 7 of them irregular
أ. مريم الهاشمي
مدرسة ب
A short text written in the present. The student moves it to the past one sentence at a time, and finds out after each sentence whether they were right.
This page is exactly what a teacher's published work will look like. Only the teacher is not real yet.
What the student does
- 1
Read it as it stands
Six sentences about an ordinary day, all in the present: I wake up, I eat, I walk to school.
- 2
Change the verb, and nothing else
The rest of the sentence stays put, so the student watches the whole change happen inside one word.
- 3
Find out on the spot
After each sentence it says right or wrong, and a miss comes back with one short reason rather than the whole rule.
- 4
Write the seventh sentence
One sentence from their own day, in the past, with no model left on the screen.
What's inside
- A six-sentence present-tense text, built to be converted
- Immediate marking after each sentence, with the reason for the miss
- 12 verbs, seven of them irregular
- One open line for a sentence of the student's own
Outcomes
Converts six sentences from present simple to past simple without changing anything else in them.
Recalls the past form of seven common irregular verbs without going back to a table.
Writes one correct past simple sentence about their own day.
What the teacher focused on
They know went. They cannot reach it while they are busy building a whole sentence. So I hand them the sentence and take back only the verb.
Teaching strategies
- One change at a time
- Immediate feedback with one short reason
- The last sentence comes from the student's life, not from the text
She kept the rest of the sentence fixed rather than asking for a full rewrite, because a rewrite brings spelling slips that hide the one mistake she is looking for. She wants to see the verb on its own.
Questions from inside it
- 1Put this sentence in the past: I walk to school with my sister.
- 2Put this sentence in the past: My father drives me home after the match.
- 3Write one sentence about yesterday. Start with: Last night I …
Curriculum
- Grade
- Grade 8
- Subject
- English
- Unit
- Tenses
- Taught in
- United Arab Emirates
Where this lesson sits in the curriculum
The same lesson appears in these countries' curricula. One page, five paths to it.
When to use it
The explanation
Moving from present simple to past simple does not touch the whole sentence, only the verb. I walk becomes I walked, my father drives becomes my father drove, and everything else stays where it was. That is the part that gets lost when a student is asked to write the sentence out again: the sentence takes all their attention and they forget that one word was the job. Regular verbs take -ed, irregular verbs are learnt, and no rule gets you out of learning them.
Common mistakes it catches
They applied the -ed rule to an irregular verb, which is a good sign rather than a bad one: the rule landed. What is missing is that wake is one of the verbs with its own form, woke.
The first verb moved and the second stayed. The tense runs across the whole sentence, not just its first verb. Ask them to underline every verb before they start.
They changed the verb and then added -ed on top of it, saying the past twice. Drove on its own is enough.