Match the Verb to Its Past Form

Six verbs are stacked in cards down the left of this 2nd grade verb-forms page — sing, gather, jump, wander, dance, run — four of them with a small picture of a child doing the action. Down the right are twelve outlined chips: ran, wandered, danced, jumped, sang, runs, gathered, gathers, wanders, dances, jumps, sings. Only six of the chips are yesterday forms; the other six are he/she today forms put there as decoys. The child reads a verb, finds its past form on the right and draws a line to it — sing to sang, run to ran, gather to gathered — one line for each verb, and six chips are left unjoined.

Recognizing a past form is the first rung, and the decoys are what give the page its teaching value. A child who joins jump to jumps has found a form of the right verb but not the right form; the line looks plausible and is wrong, and that is the mistake this page exists to surface before the child has to write the forms. Two of the six verbs are irregular — sang, ran — so the child cannot simply look for -ed. The teacher checks the leftover chips: they should all end in -s, and a stray -ed chip left over means a line went to the wrong column of the table.

A pencil and one sheet; no writing at all. It is the first page of the verb-forms family in difficulty, before the today-and-yesterday table where the child writes the forms. The choose-the-right-form page keeps the recognition format but puts the forms under a sentence, and the find-the-verb page reverses the task — the past form is in the sentence and the child writes the base.