Past tense verbs are the words that tell us an action has already occurred, like if you have already "walked" somewhere or "fell" down. These are the verbs that end in "-ed" or have a spelling change ("go" turns in to "went" in the past tense). Sometimes people and school-aged children may have difficulty with past tense verbs and therapy is required.
Therapy often includes working on the other tenses (future tense like "will go to the store" and present tense like "the dog is drinking water")so the student understands the concepts of time. They have to understand something happened after something else for it to be "past tense", such as YESTERDAY. Say, for example, if I say I run everyday it only makes sense that yesterday "I RAN". I did it yesterday- it already happened.
Often times errors include overgeneralizing or overusing "-ed" as a word ending, such as "he goed to the circus" or "they eated the sandwich". The student has not maybe learned the appropriate words such as "went" or "ate" or how to use them in sentences. Other errors occur, but much less frequently. After working on time concepts and some drill and practice as well as conversational practice, students usually learn it fairly quickly. The trick is usually figuring which words get the "-ed" ending vs. those in which the word changes spelling. Once a person has learned this, half the battle is won.
FYI- the verbs that end with "-ed" are called regular past tense verbs and developmentally, they are learned first, by roughly age 3-4. The other verbs, irregular past tense verbs, have spelling changes such as "go" to "went", "fall" to "fell", "ran" to "run" and "drink" to "drank", etc. and are later developing. They can take as long as age 7 or so to fully develop. If your child has difficulty with verbs at roughly these age levels, possible screening may be warranted. They may just need to be monitored to see if they will correct themselves or if therapy may be needed. As I always say too, use your instincts. You know when your child may need help:)!
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