Find the Verb, Write Its Base Form

Every sentence on this 2nd grade verb-forms page is complete — no gap, no chip. Eight of them are printed one to a card, six with a small picture at the left and each with a dashed box at the right: After school Leo dances at home. Yesterday Max jumped at the party. Last night Mia sang for an hour. Yesterday Tom shouted at the zoo. Today Ben reads with his sister. Last week Leo wandered in the forest. Anna ran at the picnic yesterday. Ben hides a red bike. The child underlines the verb in each sentence and writes its base form in the box: dance, jump, sing, shout, read, wander, run, hide. The forms in the sentences are a mix — -s endings, -ed endings and the irregular sang and ran.

Finding the verb is a word-class skill, and giving back its base form is a verb-forms skill; this page asks for both in one move, which is what a child does when looking a word up or when the teacher says use the verb jump. The sentences have exactly one verb each, and the surrounding words — names, times, places — are the same ones used across the family, so nothing distracts from the action word. Sang and ran are the rows that separate a child who is stripping -ed from a child who knows the verb: there is no ending to remove, only a vowel to change back. The teacher checks that the underline is on one word and that the box holds a word with no ending at all.

It prints on one sheet with a full dashed box per sentence. Use it last in the verb-forms sequence — after the table, the sentence pages and the choose-the-form page — because it assumes the child can already tell today from yesterday and now needs to travel from a form back to the verb. A nouns-and-verbs sort page is the companion for the underlining half of the task.