Guiding Your Students Into the Past Tense
This is an easy but effective "3 Step Guide" to introduce your students to the world of the Past Tense, but without having them to learn lots of new Past Tense verbs first.
First put a handful of "time words" on the board, such as: YESTERDAY, 2 DAYS AGO, LAST FRIDAY, LAST WEEK and THIS MORNING and only briefly explain their meanings.
These are the 3 steps I follow...
STEP 1: First we play Dealer's Choice using only Yes, I did / No, I didn't.
Q. Did you watch TV yesterday?
Q. Did you read a book last week?
Q. Did you do homework 2 days ago?
Q. Did you eat curry and rice last Friday?
＊ During the first few games I often check if they understand the questions...
STEP 2: We play First Out!
This time the students have to make the questions themselves. And as in step 1, everybody answers with "Yes, I did" or "No, I didn't". But this time we use the border colors and each color has a "time word" assigned to it.
Once I think they "got it", we go to the final step...
STEP 3: In the last step I introduce the Past Tense forms of the verbs that we used: watched, played, ate, drank, went, studied etc. (We go over them one by one for pronunciation and meaning)
Then we play First Out! again. But this time the students have to use the Past Tense verbs in their answers:
Q. Did you watch TV yesterday?
A. Yes, I did. I watched TV yesterday.
A. No, I didn't. I watched TV 2 days ago.
More advanced answers:
Q. Did you watch TV yesterday?
A. Yes, I did. I watched TV yesterday. I watched "Doreamon" yesterday.
A. No, I didn't. I watched TV this morning. I watched YouTube videos yesterday.
＊ You can also do Q&A pair work with your students before they go to the 3rd step. This way they get a chance to talk about the past, using Present Tense verbs, while internalizing all the Time Words...
Q. Did you go to school today?
Q. Did you watch TV yesterday?
Q. Did you study Japanese last Monday?
Q. Did you read a newspaper last week?