Time-Machine Tenses

A trio of quick games for time-travelling with verbs — talking about what happened yesterday (past tense), what’s happening now, and what will happen tomorrow (future tense). The star players are the tricky irregular verbs that ignore the “+ed” rule: went, ate, ran, fell, caught, brought, saw, gave. When a child says “we goed to the park,” that isn’t a mistake to scold — it’s proof their brain has cracked the grammar rule and is busy sorting out the exceptions.

Pick one — they’re all short:

  1. Photo recount (past). Scroll yesterday’s photos together: “What did we do?” The pictures pull past-tense verbs, irregulars included (“we went, we ate, you ran”).
  2. Act-it-out in three tenses. The child mimes a verb, then says it three ways: “Tomorrow I will jump / today I jump / yesterday I jumped.” Load it with irregulars — catch/caught, fall/fell, bring/brought.
  3. Bedtime bookends. At night, recap the day in past tense; at breakfast, predict the day in future tense.
  4. Recast, don’t correct. When you hear “we goed,” just reply with the right form inside a warm sentence: “Yes! We went to the park, and you ate an ice cream!” No “say it the right way,” no drilling — model it and move on.

Variation: Time-machine box — step into a pretend machine, set the dial to “yesterday” or “tomorrow,” and talk from there. Story do-over — retell a familiar story in the future (“the wolf will huff…”). What did teddy do? — narrate a stuffed animal’s busy day in the past tense.

Requirements

  • Space: Anywhere — table, car, bath, bedside
  • Surface: N/A
  • Materials: None; optional phone photos for the recount, or a cardboard box for the "time machine"
  • Participants: 1 adult + 1 child; works with siblings
  • Supervision: Adult-led conversation

Rationale & Objective

Tense marking is one of the last grammar systems to fall into place, so age 5 is exactly when it consolidates and benefits from playful exposure. In Brown’s (1973) classic order of acquisition, irregular past tense emerges early but is mastered late, while regular “-ed” and third-person “-s” are among the very last morphemes to stabilise. The “errors” are the good news: Marcus et al. (1992), analysing over 11,000 irregular past-tense utterances from 83 children, documented the U-shaped path where a child first says went (memorised), then over-regularises to goed/wented once the “+ed” rule comes online, then re-separates the two — and showed these forms are rare in absolute terms (a few percent of utterances). Pinker’s (1999) dual-route account explains why: regulars come from a rule, irregulars from memory, and goed is the rule over-reaching. The active ingredient here is the conversational recast — restating the child’s meaning with the correct form — which Nelson, Carskaddon & Bonvillian (1973) first showed accelerates grammar, and which Cleave et al.’s (2015) meta-analysis found effective with large effect sizes; Proctor-Williams & Fey (2007) showed recasts specifically help irregular past-tense verbs. Honest framing — over-regularisation is normal through and a little past age 5 and shouldn’t be “drilled out”; recasting works, but more is not better (Proctor-Williams & Fey found denser recasting didn’t help and could even hinder typical learners), so a few well-timed models inside real conversation beat relentless correction. Persistent, pervasive omission of tense markers (“he walk”, “yesterday she play”) well past 5, by contrast, is a recognised marker worth an SLP’s attention.

Progress Indicators

  • Early: talks mostly in present or unmarked verbs (“we go park”); past events told with no “-ed” and few irregulars; future expressed with “later” rather than “will”/“going to”; tense is inferred from context
  • Developing: uses regular “-ed” productively and reaches for past tense on purpose, but over-regularises irregulars (“we goed”, “I eated”, “he runned”) — a sign the rule has come online; “will”/“gonna” appears
  • Proficient: many common irregulars correct (went, ate, saw); harder ones still wobble (catched/caught); begins self-correcting (“he goed— went”) and uses past and future flexibly within a turn
  • Advanced: correct irregular past for most everyday verbs, used reliably across longer narratives (“yesterday we went and I fell, so tomorrow I will be careful”); grammar is accurate most of the time, with slips mainly on rare verbs

Safety Notes

  • Recast, never correct or shame — don’t say “no”, “wrong”, or “don’t say it like that”, and don’t make the child repeat the fixed form as a drill; supply the target naturally inside your reply and carry on. Overt correction isn’t the mechanism; warm recasting is
  • Over-regularisation (“goed”, “eated”) is normal and expected through age 5 and a bit beyond — it is evidence of rule-learning, not a problem to eliminate
  • Keep turns short and tied to genuinely interesting events; if it starts to feel like a quiz, stop
  • Worth mentioning to a paediatrician or speech-language pathologist if, around or after 5, the child persistently and pervasively drops tense markers (consistently “he walk”, “yesterday she play”) alongside short utterances — a pattern, not the odd irregular slip, that is associated with developmental language difficulties

Hints

  • Playfulness: a cardboard “time machine” with a dial; a puppet who always gets the verb wrong so the child fixes it; silly future predictions (“tomorrow a dinosaur will eat breakfast with us”)
  • Sustain interest: swap formats across the week — photo recount, act-it-out, bedtime bookends; tie it to real upcoming events the child cares about (a birthday, a trip)
  • Common mistake: turning it into a correction drill or pop quiz; over-recasting every utterance — a few well-timed models beat relentless ones; demanding the child repeat your sentence
  • Limited space: narrate the activity you just finished (“we built a tower and it fell!”); play “what will we do next?” in any queue or car seat — no materials at all
  • Cross-domain: narrative (recounts need past tense, predictions need future); memory and sequencing (ordering first/then/after); vocabulary (verb breadth); literacy (past-tense narration underlies story retell)
  • Progression: start with regular “-ed” and a few very frequent irregulars (went, ate) → add rarer irregulars (caught, brought, taught) → mix past and future within one little story

Sources

  • Brown, R. (1973). A First Language: The Early Stages. Harvard University Press — the order of acquisition of grammatical morphemes; MLU as a developmental index
  • Marcus, G. F., Pinker, S., Ullman, M., Hollander, M., Rosen, T. J. & Xu, F. (1992). “Overregularization in language acquisition.” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 57(4, Serial No. 228) — the U-shaped curve; over-regularisation as evidence of rule-learning
  • Pinker, S. (1999). Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. Basic Books — the dual-route account of regular vs irregular past tense
  • Nelson, K. E., Carskaddon, G. & Bonvillian, J. D. (1973). “Syntax acquisition: impact of experimental variation in adult verbal interaction with the child.” Child Development, 44(3), 497–504 — foundational recast evidence
  • Cleave, P. L., Becker, S. D., Curran, M. K., Owen Van Horne, A. J. & Fey, M. E. (2015). “The efficacy of recasts in language intervention: a systematic review and meta-analysis.” American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 24(2), 237–255
  • Proctor-Williams, K. & Fey, M. E. (2007). “Recast density and acquisition of novel irregular past tense verbs.” Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50(4), 1029–1047
  • ASHA — Communication Milestones: 4 to 5 Years (produces grammatically correct sentences; uses time words like “yesterday” and “tomorrow”; uses irregular plurals)
  • UK EYFS — Communication & Language, Speaking ELG (full sentences including past, present and future tenses, with modelling and support)