Teach Tenses To Your Child With 5 Fun Activities

Tenses are essential when learning a new language and teaching tenses to your child does not always have to be a tedious process. Try out these five fun activities to teach verb tenses to kids, these will make your child realise that grammar does not always have to be boring!

1. Flashcards

Flashcards are valuable because you can use them for several other drills, activities and prompts. Moreover, once you make flashcards, you can generate all kinds of card activities.

Using flashcards for teaching tenses to your child is easy. In the beginning, you will have to create a set of cards for irregular past tense verbs and then use them as prompts, or you can even play a matching game. Once your child gets to higher level tenses, you can return to these verb cards and combine them with helping verbs.

2. Question Formation

Question formation in any tenses is a tough part for a child. Finding fun activities around this practice is a great way to strengthen their knowledge of tenses. Sometimes kids even struggle with forming informational questions and closed questions. To get over this problem, you can provide them with simple prompts like Simon/movies and see how questions can they come up with.

You can even provide them with a prompt such as Find Someone Who and then let your child complete the question using all the tense knowledge they have.

3. Sing Out Loud

Music always lightens the mood and makes learning fun for kids. You can even teach tenses to your child with the help of this game. Start this activity by introducing a music artist to your child, and then make them listen to their songs several times. You can give them a fill-in-the-blanks sheet or make them learn and sing parts of the song.

You might want to select a song that your child understands. Make sure that the tenses are placed consecutively through the song. If the tenses are in a repetitive manner, it makes it easy for your child to memorise them.

4. Sentence Matching

There are two ways in which you can carry out this activity. You can either hand out a worksheet to your child in which they will have to match a sentence with its appropriate tense or make a card game out of this. In the card game, you have to hand out multiple half sentences to your child, and they will have to find the missing half of the sentence within the pile of cards.

Whichever way you choose to play, ensure that your child makes a grammatically and logically correct combination.

5. Name the Tenses

Through the help of this activity, your child understands how tenses work in a sentence, and they will even learn how to differentiate between various tenses.

You have to start this activity by giving your child different passages from newspapers, magazines or the internet and telling them to identify the different tenses used in them. To make the game even more challenging, you can even give them a time limit and ask them to identify a certain number of tenses within that limit.

Conclusion

Every so often, mix things up by adding fun activities and making your child’s study-time less tedious. Moreover, including fun activities in your teaching method is a good tool to ensure that your child can put classroom teaching into practical usage.

Author Bio:

Samidha Raj works as part of the content marketing team at PlanetSpark, a platform that provides online classes to K8 learners on "New Age Skills" like English Communication, Public Speaking, Grammar, Creative Writing, Debating, etc. She is passionate about empowering the youth by educating parents about the importance of 21st-century skills. In her free time, you can find her watching documentaries or animated movies and organizing game nights (board games are her thing)!