Choose the Right Verb Form: Circle One of Three

Eight sentence cards fill this 2nd grade verb-forms page, each with a dashed gap in the sentence and three outlined chips underneath: Yesterday Tom ______ at the zoo — sit, sits, sat. Emma ______ every afternoon — swims, swam, swim. On Mondays Anna ______ at the club — climbs, climb, climbed. Every day Mia ______ in the park — hopped, hops, hop. Yesterday Max ______ at the party — shouts, shouted, shout. Last week Leo ______ in the forest — wanders, wander, wandered. Today Ben ______ with his sister — runs, run, ran. Lily ______ in the garden today — dances, danced, dance. The last three cards carry a small picture. The child reads the sentence, finds the time word, and circles the form that fits. Nothing is written.

Three chips make this a choice between the base form, the he/she form and the past — the three forms the verb table teaches — with the wrong two always present as distractors. That is what makes circling harder than it looks: run is a real word and a real form, but Today Ben run with his sister is wrong, and a child has to hear the missing -s. The sentences are the same shape as the sentence pages in this family, so a child moves between circling and writing without meeting new sentence types. The teacher asks the child to read the sentence with the circled word in it, out loud, before moving on; the ear catches what the eye let through.

The page prints on one sheet with chips a second grader can circle cleanly. It is the recognition version of the verb-forms-in-sentences page: use it first for a child who is not yet ready to write the form, or afterward as a quick check. The match-the-past-form page is the other no-writing face, and the find-the-verb page moves from choosing a form to identifying one in a sentence.