September
25
ELA 20: Sept 25 Practice writing with Present Verb Tense…
- There were several students missing today, for whatever reason. (Driver training, sick, etc) Those here read through and participated in a practice sheet that attempted to help them:
- identify the verbs in sentences
- change the verb tense (from past tense to present tense)
- recognize the most common past tense verbs to be able to point them out more easily in the future.
- I had taken a short story that was originally written in past tense and typed out the first several paragraphs. On the smartboard, then, I read through the first few paragraphs and used the highlighter function to highlight the past tense verbs. Then, students contributed responses in helping me change the past tense sentences to the present tense. Once we had completed the examples in the first two paragraphs, they tried to complete the rest of the paragraphs on their own handout sheet.
- The biggest purpose for this activity is to help them identify whether the writing is in present or past tense. For their literary essays, in this class and future English ones, they’ll have to be careful to only use present tense. (The only exception to point out is if an action has occured in the past in a story, such as Mrs. Givens dying. Her actions cannot be written in the present tense because she is not presently IN the story. That’s where it can get tricky but we’ll stick with the more simple rules first.)
- Students then had some extra time that was spent typing out their paragraphs, etc.