I am working with a 6 year-old on using correct irregular past tense verbs. As you know, I mostly use toys, games and great kids’ literature as my therapy materials.
I have a tub of Polly Pocket dolls and accessories to charm most every girl, so I brought them out today. I had a pool, diving board, table and chairs, drinks, and beach bags to start the action and added the slide into the water and ride on a dolphin set from Walmart. It has some small parts that are hard to keep track of but kids love to play in the water and take Polly for a ride on the dolphin!
I started with a great list of Irregular Verbs from Georgia State University’s website. It is an excellent list that you can print out and take data on. Then we played with Polly, repeating irregular past tense verbs as we acted them out–caught the ball, wore a bathing suit, came to the pool, ate lunch, and sat in a chair. This little girl tends to generalize the -ed rule and say “tooked” for took or “felled” for fell. So I put out two objects different in shape and color to represent the beginning and ending sound of TooK and FeLL. We touched Polly’s skirt 
for the beginning sound and her purse for the ending sound. When she added the -ed I added a shoe to represent her added ending to point out what she needed to omit. This visual, tactile reminder helped her to stop after the purse and not add the -ed to the irregular past tense verb. We literally threw the shoe away, pointing out that it wasn’t needed.
She loved this visual reminder and was becoming more aware of end sounds as we emphasized them.
What activities do you use to teach verbs in language lessons? Share them in the comments below.
