Confused by Verbs: Recommended List of Past Tense Verbs To Know 1 (By Category!)

Hello everyone! In this series of “Confused by Verbs” blog posts, I will be focusing on both the transformation of regular and irregular verbs.

First of all, let’s do a quick recap on what verbs are. See if you and your child can pick out the verbs found in the two sentences below:

If you picked ‘got’, ‘looked’ and ‘were’, you are absolutely right! Verbs are words that describe an action and they are several types of verbs. Do you also know that verbs are the only words in the English language that have tenses? That’s what makes them so special!

For these posts on the transformation of verbs, I will be focusing on action verbs, which include both regular and irregular verbs. It is important to know the difference between the two especially when you need to transform these verbs into their past tense and past participle forms. For instance, in the example above, ‘look’ is a regular verb and you get its past tense form by adding ‘ed’. On the other hand, ‘get’ is an irregular verb and therefore does not follow this pattern.

Some of you might wonder, doesn’t the transformation of regular verbs only require us to add ‘ed’ or ‘d’ to the action verb? Actually, there is more to transformation of regular verbs than just adding ‘ed’ or ‘d’! However, before we delve into more complicated transformations, let’s start with the simplest ones in our blog post today: the transformation of regular verbs into their past tense form by adding ‘ed’ to the main verb. Take a look at the list below:

To help your child grasp and practise this particular transformation, download the worksheets below. Read the sentences with your child and get him/her to transform the verbs into the past tense on their own. Read on to find out how the other 2 worksheets are to be used!

From the list that we have shared, do you realise that there are some patterns in the transformation of regular verbs? To help your child remember and recognise some of these patterns, I have come up with a simple list that your child can use for his/her revision.

Regular Verbs: ‘E’ and ‘D’ are Best Friends!

Do you know that in most instances, when a regular verb ends with ‘e’, the letter ‘d’ is added to produce its past tense? Here is a list of such verbs:

To help your child get used to this new transformation, click on the earlier link to download and attempt worksheet 2 which will help your child recognise this pattern easily.

Practice Makes Perfect!

Many young English learners are not used to checking the spelling of words to know if they should add ‘ed’ or ‘d’ to the regular verb to transform it into the past tense form. To help your child practise and be more aware of the difference, try worksheet 3 that covers both types of transformations! ( Download all the worksheets using the yellow box form above!)

Did your child get all the answers right? Celebrate with his/her favourite dessert for a job well done!

Does this mean that you should just add ‘d’ to all verbs that end with ‘e’? I’m afraid not as this rule does not apply to irregular verbs that end with ‘e’. Such verbs are: awake, bite, come, drive, flee, freeze, hide, leave, lie, make, ride, shake, strike, take, wake, weave, and write. The past tense of these verbs cannot be obtained by adding ‘d’ to the original verb. The transformation of these verbs will be covered in a later blogpost.

That’s all folks! Do tune in to the next blogpost that covers other essential verb transformation rules. =)