A concrete understanding of English tenses will help your child develop their English speaking, listening, and writing skills. However, no matter how helpful they are for them, you must have seen them not showing excitement during these lessons. This is common in many kids because they are tired of doing the same grammar exercises time and again.

To throw the boredom and difficulty out of your child’s learning time, we are going to help you introduce fun grammar games into their learning plans.

Here are some exciting tenses games you can try.

1. Making questions

There are chances that your child has difficulty forming questions in different tenses. So, basing activities around this will help enhance their knowledge of various ways they could use tenses to form questions.

In this activity, you can provide your child with simple prompts such as burger/Mary and see how many questions can they form with it.

2. Quiz

For this activity, you will need two participants. Take card templates that will contain 16 sentences with a missing tense verb.

Every card will have a sentence like this: She ___ up early for work, every morning. (wake)

Your child will pick up one of the card templates and figure out the missing tense for the sentence to make sense. This will test your child’s understanding of narrative tenses.

3. Sing it out loud

You can start this activity by introducing a band or an artist to your child, and then you can have your child listen to their songs several times. You can give them a fill-in-the-blanks sheet or have them learn and sing parts of the song.

Such grammar activities will give your child practical knowledge of using tenses in sentences.

4. Name the tenses

This activity will help your child to understand how tenses in English operate and differ. Give them different passages from newspapers, magazines or the internet and tell them to identify the different tenses used in them.

You can even give them a time limit and ask them to identify a certain number of tenses within that limit.

5. Match-up LEGO bricks

Almost every child loves playing with LEGO. Use this to your strength and inculcate a fun learning activity in this.

Write irregular verbs and their corresponding past or future tense on individual LEGO brick. Let your child find the matching pieces.

6. Tell a story from a picture

Provide your child with a picture, ask them to study it, and make a story out of what they saw. Let them set the story in the past, present, and future tense.

This activity will boost your child’s knowledge of tenses, and they can boost their knowledge on how to use them.

7. Let the characters teach

Stories are a great way to teach your child English tenses. Start a story by introducing a character to your child and further let your child develop a story - logical or illogical does not matter - around the character.

Ensure that your child uses action verbs and lots of tenses inside their story. This activity will effectively teach your child to build sentences, and they will know how to use tenses in the language.

8. Listen and say

Record short advertisements, interviews, or radio segments and play them in front of your child. Tell them to listen to it carefully and make notes of the verb tenses used in them. Later, have them discuss those notes with you and figure out why and what tenses were used in those sentences.

This activity will let your child acknowledge how they can use tenses in real-life contexts.

Bottom Line:

Mixing things up every now so often is necessary. Adding fun activities to your child’s learning lessons will help them understand how to put their theoretical teachings into practical use.