Verbs

One of the things we find ourselves correcting most with C's grammar is his use of tense with verbs. It is one of those hard topics because there are so many verbs and quite a few that 'break the rules' as C likes to put it. So one day after correcting him on the same word a couple of times we decided we would learn about verbs.

"Verbs are doing words" I said. I remember that from Year 3, there was a poster on the wall. I don't remember when I was actually taught it, I just remember that poster. "BUT.... there are different tense for verbs, so different words for the same action, depending on when we are talking about". So then as a nice general rule, we settled on 'yesterday', ' today' and 'tomorrow'.

We began to write a list, and I figured after a couple he would get bored and go back to playing Lego, but one and a half pages later, we are still adding to the list.

He would say for example "run is a doing word" and I would then say "Yes, so yesterday I ......" and he would reply "ran", "today I am ......", "running", "and tomorrow I will .....", "run" and I would type the words in.

We talked about the 'ing' and 'ed' suffixes and how sometimes the words 'break the rules' and change in past tense.

Here is the table we used and a blank copy too. C has a copy in his Language file where he can add words as we encounter them.

Verb Tense Blank

Verb Tense List

I hope you have as much fun exploring verbs as C and I have.