teaching ESL students about past tense

Welcome! Teaching the past tense is one of the most rewarding milestones in an ESL classroom, but because it involves shifting how students think about time and word structures, the right approach depends heavily on who you are teaching. Before we map out our lesson plans, I would love to know a bit more about your classroom.

To help me tailor this session, what is the age group or language proficiency level (e.g., beginner, intermediate) of the ESL students you are teaching?

They are young learners / kids (beginners)

It is wonderful to hear that you are working with eager young beginners! Teaching this age group is incredibly rewarding, but because they are still concrete thinkers, standard grammar tables will only confuse them.

Making Time Visible

Before we introduce past tense verbs, young learners first need to understand the actual concept of "the past" in English. For beginner kids, "past" is a highly abstract concept, so we want to make it physical and visual. One of the most effective ways to do this is by drawing a simple, colorful timeline on your board. You do not need complex labels; instead, use highly recognizable symbols and photos to anchor their understanding. By placing a photo of "our classroom right now" on the right side and a drawing of a moon or a bed to represent "sleeping last night" on the left, you help them physically see where they are in time compared to where they were.

A horizontal temporal timeline representing the transition from Yesterday to Today, marked by a crescent moon and calendar on the left, a sleeping divider in the center, and a radiant sun and clock on the right.

Setting up this visual framework on day one gives you a physical point of reference. Whenever you introduce a past action later in your unit, you can point back to the left side of this timeline to instantly cue your students that you are talking about something that is already finished.

can you add an activity or game to learn past tense

Now that we have established a visual timeline on the board, we want to bring those past events to life using their bodies. With young beginner ESL kids, we do this using , which pairs spoken English with physical movement to help them build immediate, muscle-memory connections to new verbs.

Modeling Action on the Timeline

To begin, you will want to model a few simple, everyday actions. Walk across the room normally and say, "I walk." Then, step backward, point dramatically to the "past" side of your visual timeline, and exaggeratingly mimic the finished action while saying, "Yesterday, I walked!" Next, have the whole class stand up and do it with you. Have them exaggerate the physical action of stopping, pointing back to the left, and chanting the past tense phrase. Keep the focus entirely on a small handful of high-frequency, concrete verbs that kids love to act out, like jump, dance, wash, and cook.

An ESL teacher modeling the past tense verb 'jumped' by jumping mid-air and pointing to a timeline labeled 'yesterday', with her students mirroring the action.

By combining physical movement with the visual timeline, you are giving your young learners multiple concrete anchors to grasp this abstract grammar concept. Once they have practiced these movements as a group, they will be ready to try a game that turns this physical modeling into a playful challenge.

Continue to an age-appropriate past tense game

Action Mime

Now that your students are moving and grooving, you can channel that physical energy into a game called Action Mime. This is a simple, high-energy way to turn your practice into an active game that requires absolutely zero prep work.

Here is how to play:

Have one student come to the front of the classroom as the "Actor."
Whisper a familiar action verb to them, like "jump."
The Actor must silently perform the action (jumping) while the rest of the class watches.
Once the class guesses the action in the present tense ("jump!"), the Actor freezes, points dramatically back to the "yesterday" side of your whiteboard timeline, and the whole class must chant, "Yesterday, he/she jumped!"

Using this game keeps the focus entirely on concrete, high-frequency verbs while giving every child a physical and visual cue to associate the new verb ending with past time.