Nine lessons that build the past simple and past continuous out of pupils own memories, with a bank of irregular verbs organised by sound rather than by list.
Irregular verbs are usually handed to pupils as an alphabetical list of two hundred items to memorise, which is close to the least effective way of learning them. This unit groups them by the sound change instead, so that pupils meet drink, sing and swim together and learn a pattern rather than three unrelated facts.
The narrative work runs alongside it. Pupils tell and then write true accounts of things that happened to them: a journey, a festival, a day that went wrong. Because the content is real, the past tense has something to do, and pupils notice when the tense slips.
The past continuous is introduced only in lesson six, and only in contrast with the past simple, because it is almost always taught too early. Teachers who have used the unit report that the contrast lesson is the one where the whole tense finally settles.
They are sequenced from the most regular pattern to the most irregular. Skipping ahead to the difficult families first is the usual reason the approach fails.
The best narratives from each class become the reading material for the next one. A wall of pupil writing does more for motivation than any printed text.
Choose a single error type for each piece and ignore the rest. Pupils who get every mistake underlined stop reading the feedback.
Ten lessons that build the present simple out of what pupils already do every day, from waking before dawn to sweeping the compound at dusk.
A complete unit on asking questions in English, built for classes where the teacher has a blackboard and the pupils have an exercise book and nothing else.