Talking about my past

Appropriate Population: 

• School-age (or slightly below)

Goal: Use regular and irregular past tense verbs to talk about important events in the child’s past. 

Steps

1. Explain that you will be talking about things that have already happened, in the past. Explain that when you talk about things in the past you change the word by putting an -ed on the end. Explain that this rule works for a lot of words but that there are some tricky ones where it doesn’t work!. Establish that today you will be using words with an ed ending and some without!
2. Have the child choose pictures from a photo album or from a caregivers phone. Have them choose photos of events that are significant to them such as a family holiday or their first day of school.
3. Look at the pictures together and talk about what you see, give the child lots of suggestions of past tense verbs they might like to use when they tell you about this picture “it looks like you went to water world, maybe you went on some slides, maybe you splashed your brother, maybe you ran to the gates” Can you tell me what happened?
4. As the child describes what happened you want to reinforce correct use of sentence structure through
5. Multiple repeats of any past tense verbs said in error.   E.g C: We goed to the pools, A: Oh you went to the pools, you went there in the summer, you went with your brother! (Aim for at least three repeats for words said in error)
6.  Specific reinforcement of correct past tense verbs. E.g  C: We went to the pools A: It’s great that you remembered to say went instead of goed, that would have been fun!  

Continue to talk about these photos implementing these two strategies. Introduce new photos when the child is ready to change topic. 

Step up: 

• Talk about different aspects to this past event, e.g what they did, how they got there, what they ate.- This conversation will generate new and potentially lower frequency verbs to practice..