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Teaching Past Tense Irregular Verbs: Worksheets and Activities
Irregular verbs are verbs that do not follow the convention of adding 'ed' at the end of the verb to form past tense statements. Although there are only about 180 past tense verbs in the modern English language, they are the most commonly occuring verbs. According to Steven Pinker, 70 percent of the time we use a verb, it is an irregular verb. The implication for pedagogy is that irregular verbs are an extremely important area to cover.
In this section, we have added resources for teaching irregular verbs along with their spelling. We have taken what we feel are the 90 most important verbs and divided them into three groups of 30 verbs and then created resources for each of those groups of 30. We have tried to structure it so that the first group contains the simplest and most frequently occuring verbs.
The resources are listed altogether below this introduction. For an explanation on how to use some of them scroll down below the resources.
Irregular Verbs: Group 1
Verb List: begin/began, blow/blew, bring/brought, buy/bought, catch/caught, come/came, do/did, draw/drew, drink/drank, eat/ate, get/got, give/gave, go/went, grow/grew, hear/heard, know/knew, make/made, meet/met, read/read, run/ran, say/said, see/saw, send/sent, sing/sang, sit/sat, sleep/slept, swim/swam, take/took, throw/threw, write/wrote.
Resources: Writing Practice 1-15, Writing Practice 16-30, Word Search, Word Flash Cards
Irregular Verb Cloze 1-15, Irregular Verb Cloze 16-30, Past Tense Young Learners
Irregular Verbs: Group 2
Verb List: become/became, bite/bit, break/broke, choose/chose, drive/drove, fall/fell, feel/felt, fly/flew, fight/fought, find/found, hold/held, hide/hid, hit/hit, keep/kept, leave/left, lose/lost, mean/meant, pay/paid, put/put, quit/quit, shut/shut, sell/sold, spend/spent, speak/spoke, stand/stood, teach/taught, tell/told, win/won, wear/wore
Resources: Writing Practice 31-45, Writing Practice 46-60, Word Search, Word Flash Cards
Irregular Verb Cloze 31-45, Irregular Verb Cloze 46-60, Past Tense 2 Young Learner 2
Irregular Verbs: Group 3
Verb List: beat/beat, bend/bent, build/built, burn/burnt, cost/cost, cut/cut, dream/dreamt, dig/dug, feed/fed, fit/fit, forget/forgot, hurt/hurt, leap/leapt, learn/learnt, lead/led, lend/lent, let/let, light/lit, ring/rang, rise/rose, sink/sank, set/set, shake/shook, shoot/shot, slide/slid, stink/stank, steal/stole, stick/stuck, tear/tore, wake/woke.
Resources: Writing Practice 61-75, Writing Practice 76-90, Word Search, Word Flash Cards
Irregular Verb Cloze 61-75, Irregular Verb Cloze 76-90, Past Tense Young Learners 3
Past Tense Young Learners 4 (Reviews all of the 90 verbs above. Refresh to get a new worksheets)