The mid-year exam for 7th graders comprises a MCQ section, in which they must use contextual clues to select the correct grammar item. Here’s an example:

1. I ________ rice every day.
   a) eat
   b) eats
   c) ate

Our workbook boasts two exercises of 15 MCQs each, but based on past experience, I knew that I couldn’t just go through these questions because kids are typically confused about tenses. So, I shrewdly decided to focus on the teaching of time phrases.

I put the black magnetic strips I had bought in Japan to excellent use by putting one small piece behind a card. Each card held a time phrase. Examples are seen as follows:

This aspect of the lesson went fairly well. Most students were able to paste their time phrase in the right category.

I then did the same on high frequency verbs from the Dolch List, except that I didn’t have time to put the magnetic strip behind cards. So, I used plain old Post-It notes for these words: go, went, get, got, find, found, eat, ate, give, gave. Basically verbs from this list:

The kiddos didn’t do so well this time round because they had scant idea of past tense verbs and present tense verbs, but that’s okay because I now knew their current level of proficiency.

All in all, I thought my lesson was effective in getting students to pick up the time phrase from a MCQ, especially after I distilled my learning points into this:

Note to self: Need to check that students don’t misspell ago as ego.