Fun Ways to Teach Verbs in World Language Classes

Hot Potato for Verbs

The College Board – creator of the famous SAT – recommends playing a form of hot potato to drill students on verbs. The teacher uses any small object, though not necessarily a potato, and asks for one conjugation of a verb. The teacher then tosses the object to a student, who has five seconds to give the correct conjugation. That student then tosses the object to another student, who has five seconds to correctly conjugate the verb in a different form. Though the College Board recommends using this method to teach subjunctive conjugations in Spanish, this game could be used for any conjugations in any language.

This game requires a hat, a pen and a class full of students. On a piece of paper, write out different verbs and different forms. On another piece of paper, write the correct conjugations. Then cut each of these out and place all the forms and the correct conjugations in a hat. Have each student draw one – and only one – of these pieces of paper. Give the students five minutes to find their counterpart with either the correct verb form or the correct conjugation.

The members of the English Club – teachers of English as a Second Language – suggest using music to drill students in areas of language competence. In such a context, a song that is heavy on a specific verb form can be used to enforce students’ understanding of that verb form – in any language. To do this, play the song for your students. Then give them a sheet with the lyrics in the original language; a second column with an English translation is optional. Ask the students to underline every word in that specific verb form. Then go over each one and reinforce the meanings and conjugations. “Nitzmadnu” by Shlomo Artzi, for example, is a song rife with verbs in the “nif’al” binyan in Hebrew.

To play this game, you need to construct a board with different-colored boxes. You also need dice, monopoly money, a pen and colored cards aligning with these boxes. Each color represents a verb form (e.g., first person singular). Students take turns rolling the dice and landing on colored boxes. When the student lands on a colored box, he picks up a colored piece of paper with a verb form on it. The teacher then chooses the verb that the student must correctly conjugate. Each correct conjugation is worth a certain amount of monopoly money, according to color. At the end of the game, the student with the largest amount of monopoly money wins five extra credit points on the next test.