Past 3

It’s always fun to get to know students by hearing about their past experiences and maybe learning a few interesting things about them that I never would’ve guessed before working on the Past 3 lesson. Past Participle is very difficult for a lot of students because they don’t usually use that form of the verb. They’re so used to relying on simple past tense that they just assume that it will fit into a past participle sentence without any problems.

When I started out the item with the students – two men and a woman – I first gave them the opportunity to use the flash cards to make up, “Have you ever?” questions. This only required them to fill in the blanks with what was on the flash cards so it wasn’t very difficult, but it did give them a chance to familiarize themselves with the sentence structure and verb tenses. After they were comfortable with this part, I moved onto a different set of flash cards that had the verbs in the simple present form. The students were then called upon to conjugate the verbs into the simple past and past participle form. While the simple past was fairly easy for them, except for a few tricky ones that they hesitated over, the past participle proved to be a lot more challenging. To make it easier for them, I wrote a chart up on the board with the verbs in question and filled in the ones that they didn’t know. After taking some notes, we took another look at the flash cards and the, “Have you ever?” question format. Now the students would need to ask the questions after having changed the verbs into the past participle format. After a bit of practice and some quick consultations with their notes, the students were able to smoothly ask each other questions like, “Have you ever ridden a scooter?” with but a short pause while they changed ‘ride’ to ‘ridden’ in their heads.

We did some more practice with the past participle by using the curriculum and some accompanying activities. With some time remaining, we played a truth or lie game that the students really enjoyed. The students took turn claiming to have done something (like eaten frog legs) and the others would have to guess if it was true or a lie. We kept score on the board and sometimes added a new verb to the list when one of the students would want to use a sentence with a verb that we hadn’t covered yet. This was a really great lesson for getting all of the students involved and for learning fun facts about each other.