It was raining today so we donned our waterproof trousers and went to the closest woods. We talked about tenses and I asked the children to think of a verb and say it in each tense. I then made a small picture and explained that there would be two different lands in the woods today – present tense land and past tense land.

In present tense land I said..

‘I am picking up a stick… I am wrapping the stick etc’

we then moved to past tense land – a completely different area – and I said it all again in past tense.

The children then worked in groups and we visited them all in each land and I asked the audience to suggest alternative verbs. The language became more and more complex and by the end the children were talking about re-morphing, constructing, obtaining etc. wonderful!

We had quite a discussion about whether we would be time -travelling backwards or forwards to go from present tense land to past tense land. We were also able to discuss the use of ‘ed’ on many past tense words and the words that can be verbs and nouns, e.g. fishing and fish.