How to Teach Tenses to Kids: Talk First, Tense Chart Last

Tenses often arrive as a twelve-box chart to memorise, long before a child can use the forms in their own speech. There’s a better order for teaching tenses to kids. Talk about time first, and notice the patterns in stories second. Bring out a small tenses chart last, as a summary of what your child can already say. Here’s a six-week plan you can run at home. For the wider picture, see our parent’s guide to English grammar.

The short answer

A tense tells you when something happens: before now, now, or later. Children understand time long before they understand grammar, so start there. Talk every day about yesterday, today and tomorrow, and let your child hear the verbs change. Collect irregular verbs from stories. Only then bring out a chart, and fill it with your child’s own sentences. One habit helps most: when a tense slips mid-story, say the sentence back correctly and let the story carry on.

What’s the six-week plan for teaching tenses?

Where does the tenses chart come in?

At the end, and smaller than you’d expect. For six- to nine-year-olds, a six-box chart is plenty. Past, present and future go across the top. Down the side go the simple form and the “-ing” form. Irregular verbs like go and went get their own collection list underneath. That isn’t every tense in English; it’s the handful children actually use. Here’s what it looks like:

Saying the tenses in Hindi as you fill the chart helps too: khela (played), khelta hai (plays), khelega (will play) follow the same past, present and future shape as English.

Notice the present column. “I play cricket” is something that happens regularly, while “I am playing” is happening right now. Mixing those two up is common, so the chart keeps them apart. The full twelve-tense table, with “had been going” and “will have gone”, can wait. In NCERT’s learning outcomes, which CBSE adopted for Classes I–VIII, Class III children are expected to tell simple past from simple present (3.E.LO9). Wider “time and tense” work is named in Class VII (7.E.LO16).

Your child’s school book may call the “-ing” forms continuous tenses: present continuous (“I am playing”) and past continuous (“I was playing”). The Hindi pair makes the difference easy to hear: जाता हूँ (jaata hoon) is “I go” every day, and जा रहा हूँ (ja raha hoon) is “I am going” right now.

How does this change with age?

• Ages 5–6: talk only. Yesterday, today and tomorrow in conversation, and lots of stories read aloud. No labels needed.
• Ages 6–8: simple past, present and future, plus the “-ing” forms (“is running”, “was running”), and the six-box chart at the end. Irregular verb collecting starts here. For “is running”, your child also needs “is”, “am” and “are”, which our guide to when to use is, am and are covers.
• Ages 8–10: keeping one tense steady through a whole story. A quick check: ask your child to retell a film or a cricket match, and listen for the verbs.
• Ages 10–12: the full twelve-tense table, now as names for patterns your child already uses.

Does teaching tenses through talk actually work?

No study has tested this exact routine, but three findings support parts of it. Children learning English master “-ing” early and the regular “-ed” ending later, as Roger Brown (1973) found. “Goed”-type slips are rare: about 2.5% of irregular pasts for the typical child in a study of 83 children by Gary Marcus and colleagues (1992). And a major review of writing research by Graham and Perin (2007), covering students in Grades 4 to 12, linked traditional grammar lessons to weaker writing, while sentence-combining practice helped.

Does Hindi help or get in the way?

Mostly it helps. Hindi marks time on the verb too (gaya tha, jaata hai, jaayega), so the idea of tense isn’t new. There’s a fun talking point too: Hindi’s kal means both ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’, and only the verb tells you which. English splits them into two words.

Two slips are especially common for Indian children. “I have seen it yesterday” is a well-known Indian English pattern. With a finished time like “yesterday”, school English wants the simple past: “I saw it yesterday.” “Did you went?” is a common learner slip everywhere. After “did”, English goes back to the base verb: “Did you go?” Our guide to common grammar mistakes Indian kids make explains more of these.

“The nine- and ten-year-olds who struggle most with tenses in my classes are rarely the ones who never saw a chart. More often, they haven’t yet had much practice telling stories in English.” Monika Verma, Lead Trainer, Little Learns

Milestones from the curriculum

These milestones are adapted from the Marble skill taxonomy, an open skill-progression framework, which places them between ages 6 and 9.

Parents also ask

Every child develops at their own pace — see our learning-outcomes note. The ages above are typical ranges; plenty of children take longer.