Teach Primary Issue 19.6

Parallel actions When two things were happening at the same time in the past, past progressive is used to describe both actions. The girls were playing football and the boys were swimming . Consider how the meaning changes if this was written in simple past tense: The girls played football and the boys swam . If someone asked, ‘What were the girls and boys doing at 2pm yesterday?’ Past continuous tense would be the appropriate tense for the response. If a child was writing a postcard to their parents from a school trip and started with, ‘Yesterday was brilliant!’ The sentence that followed would be better in simple past tense – ‘The girls played football and the boys swam.’ Deciding on simple past or past continuous depends on what you are trying to say. Teaching strategies The past progressive often stumps children when they are asked a question about it in grammar tests, but by teaching it through some of the ideas suggested below, you can help them come to understand the term. S ometimes the past progressive tense is known as the past continuous tense, which is probably a better term to help remember what it is referring to. Past progressive describes actions that were ongoing in the past. It is used to describe actions that were either interrupted or ran parallel to another action. Let’s look at some examples to make this term clearer: They were dancing in the crowd while the band was playing their favourite song. He was watching TV when mum called him for dinner. Interrupted actions When an action is interrupted by another action (the boy’s television watching was interrupted by his mum calling him for dinner) the other action is often described in the simple past tense, in this case ‘called’. They were eating their picnic when the thunderstorm started . He was playing computer games when the fire alarm started . She was crying to her friend when her mum appeared . The words in red are in the past progressive tense , and the words in purple are in the simple past tense. Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar? If you have ever attended Scouts or Guides you may have played this game before. Select a child to be the investigator. Ask the rest of the class to close their eyes and then you can choose one pupil to ‘take a cookie from the cookie jar’. You don’t need to have a literal cookie, as long as the selected child knows that they are the ‘taker’. Next, get all the pupils to chant, “Who took the cookie from the cookie jar?” The investigator then suggests a child and that child replies, “Who me?”. The investigator says, “Yes you” and then the child makes up a reason why they didn’t take the cookie from the cookie jar, and what they were doing instead; e.g. “I was skydiving when the cookie was eaten.” Keep going until the child who was selected as the ‘taker’ is found. To emphasise the past progressive, you could capture all How to teach the past PROGRESSIVE TENSE Do your pupils know their ‘walked’ from their ‘was walking’ and their ‘ate’ from their ‘was eating’? Explain it all clearly and effectively with these simple games... of the reasons children give, e.g. ‘was skydiving’, and add them to a working wall. What time is it? This lesson covers grammar and maths! Put cards showing various times in a box or bag. We have activity sheets which have written times ( sheet 1 ) and analogue clocks with times ( sheet 2) on them, which you can download at the link on the right. Get the children to take it in turns to pull out a time and say what they were doing at that time, using the past 94 | www.teachwire.net LAURA DOBSON