Tenses Lesson Plan: Conventions of Standard English

*Click to open and customize your own copy of the Tenses Lesson Plan. 

This lesson accompanies the BrainPOP topic Tenses, and supports the standard of forming and using simple, progressive, and perfect verb tenses. Students demonstrate understanding through a variety of projects.

Step 1: ACTIVATE PRIOR KNOWLEDGE

Ask students to think about what they did after school yesterday, and what they plan to do after school today. Prompt them to focus on the verbs in their responses. Ask:

• How do the verbs you use change when you talk about the past or when you talk about the future? 

Step 2: BUILD KNOWLEDGE

• Read the description on the Tenses topic page.
• Play the Movie, pausing to check for understanding. 
• Assign Related Reading. Have students read one of the following articles: “In Depth” or “Around the World” Partner them with someone who read a different article to share what they learned with each other.
  

Step 3: APPLY and ASSESS 

Assign Tenses Quiz, prompting students to apply essential literacy skills while demonstrating what they learned about this topic.

Step 4: DEEPEN and EXTEND

Students express what they learned about tenses while practicing essential literacy skills with one or more of the following activities. Differentiate by assigning ones that meet individual student needs.

• Make-a-Movie: Produce a video diary about a day in your life. In your narrative, conjugate at least three different verbs in the past, future, present perfect, and past perfect tenses.
• Make-a-Map: Create a timeline showing how to conjugate an irregular verb in the past, present, and future tenses. 
• Creative Coding: Code a game challenging players to sort verbs by tense. 

More to Explore 

Related BrainPOP Topics: Deepen understanding of conventions of standard English with these topics: Verbs and their Objects, Parts of Speech, and Subject and Predicate.

Teacher Support Resources:

• Pause Point Overview: Video tutorial showing how Pause Points actively engage students to stop, think, and express ideas. 
• Learning Activities Modifications: Strategies to meet ELL and other instructional and student needs.
• Learning Activities Support: Resources for best practices using BrainPOP.