Verbs are an essential part of languages and learning to use them well sometimes depends on teaching them well.
When it comes to irregular verbs the challenge to learn and teach them gets more difficult. I came up with the idea of teaching them from another perspective because I wanted to keep my students busy and engaged on learning them for a couple of months while the competitive factor was introduced.
So, the question was: How can they learn/I teach my 1st ESO students the irregular verbs making it competitive for a couple of months?.
A cyclist race was the key, so I turned the tedious irregular verbs list into «The Irregular verbs Tour of 1st ESO». We have had a stage twice a week since the middle of March. There were 13 stages. In each of them, students had to learn 10 verbs. To carry it out, I gave them a sheet of paper with only the meaning of the verb in Spanish. They had 5 minutes maximum to write the infinitive, the past and the past participle. They changed their papers and checked and also marked their partner’s paper. After that I collected all the papers and wrote down the daily classification and also their «stage time» (points). Every four stages they had to study 40 verbs because they had a difficult «Mountain Stage» and the last stage of all they had a «Time Trial» stage (contrarreloj), in which they had to write as many verbs as they could (out of forty) in 12 minutes.
I think they had fun, learnt verbs and kept them engaged for couple of months in a healthy competitive activity and that deserved a reward so we had our particular prize-giving ceremony.
