Higher Level Regular Past Tense Verbs

One thing I'm always worried about when planning therapy is making sure that I'm using a wide variety of stimulus materials.  I don't want my students to learn grammatical rules in a limited situation, or to apply them to a limited number of words.  Part of this is really varying that number words that I'm using in therapy.  Most of the past tense verbs activities use, and reuse the same, simple past tense verbs again and again.  I started thinking about using past tense verbs as a vocabulary building activity. The higher level vocabulary increases the number of verbs I'm presenting to kids to conjugate and makes the words more appropriate to the older students on my caseload.

I started writing words down and ended up with so many I made two separate activities.  The two different activities have completely different words!   I wanted to make two activities so I could vary the activity a little for my students.  When we get tired of robots we can move to the owls and vice versa. 


Past Tense Robots

The first activity is the Regular Past Tense Robots card deck.  It's available in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

 The robots activity is divided into three levels and is 18 pages long.

Level One has students working at the word level.  48 verb cards are provided with 16 verbs with a D voiced -ed ending, 16 with a T voiced -ed ending and 16 with a ED voiced -ed ending.

Students draw cards and changed the words to past tense verbs.  This is the time I discuss any unfamiliar vocabulary words.

I've also included a mat to show the spelling for the ending and the three different kinds of voicing.  I've found that this helps some, not all, of my students learn the voicing rules for past tense verbs.  Students can sort the robot cards by what kind of sound the -ed makes.

Level Two has students work in sentences.  Sentences are provided on the robot cards with the target verb underneath in red.  Students need to change the verb and put it in the sentence.

Level Three requires students to make their own sentences using the target verbs and uses the same cards from level one.

Game Cards are also included.  Students can draw robots from the deck and collect them.  If they get a "gears are stuck" card they must put one robot back.

Grab the Past Tense Robots in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.


Past Tense Owls

My second past tense activity is my Past Tense Owls.  This card deck contains 48 verbs that are completely unique from the robot deck and also have 16 verbs with each voicing of the -ed ending.  The structure of the activity is the same as my Robots one.

The owl activity is divided into three levels and is 18 pages long.

Grab the Owl Verbs activity in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

Level One has students working at the word level.  Students draw cards and changed the words to past tense verbs.  This is the time I discuss any unfamiliar vocabulary words.

I've also included an Owl mat to show the spelling for the ending and the three different kinds of voicing.  I've found that this helps some, not all, of my students learn the voicing rules for past tense verbs.  Students can sort the owl cards by what kind of sound the -ed makes.

Level Two has students work in sentences.  Sentences are provided on the owl cards with the target verb underneath in red.  Students need to change the verb and put it in the sentence.

Level Three requires students to make their own sentences using the target verbs and uses the same cards from level one.

Game Cards are also included.  Students play by attempting to collect as many owls as possible.  Cards with two owls are worth two points.  Special cards have sleeping owls and suns on them.  If students draw a sleeping owl one of their owls fell asleep and they lose one owl.  If they draw a sun card, all of their owls were caught out in the sun and they lose all of their owls.

Grab the owl activity her in my Teachers Pay Teachers Store.