Verb Tenses Worksheets

How a question looks

You are given the base verb and a sentence with a blank in it. "Yesterday we ___ to the museum. (go)" wants went.

Pick a single tense — past, or present, or future — to drill it, or choose mixed and get all three jumbled together. Six to twelve items a sheet, and an answer key if you want one.

The bank is fixed and it is checked

Forty-eight sentences, sixteen per tense. Written by hand and checked, rather than generated.

That is a deliberate limit. English conjugation is riddled with irregulars, and an algorithm that adds "-ed" produces catched and swimmed on a worksheet a child will believe. A curated bank cannot do that. What it does mean is that a pupil working through many sheets will start seeing repeats, which is fine for practice and not much use as a test.

Irregulars are the point

The past-tense set leans on them heavily: went, ate, ran, saw, wrote, took, bought, brought, swam, sang, drank, began, caught, taught, built.

These are the verbs children get wrong, and they get them wrong in an interesting way. A child who says "I goed" has learnt the rule and is applying it correctly to a word that does not follow it — a sign of progress rather than of ignorance. It is fixed by exposure, one verb at a time, which is exactly what a worksheet is good for.

Context, not conjugation tables

Each item is a sentence rather than a bare verb, and that changes the task.

Reciting "go, went, gone" is memorisation, and it transfers to writing far less reliably than teachers hope. Filling a gap in a sentence requires reading the sentence, noticing the time marker — yesterday, tomorrow, every day — and choosing accordingly, which is the skill actually needed when composing.

Using the mixed mode

Teach one tense at a time, then mix.

Single-tense sheets build the form. Mixed sheets test whether the pupil can spot which tense is called for, and a child who is fluent on the past sheet and lost on the mixed one has learnt the conjugation without learning when to use it — which is worth finding out.

Who it suits

Primary and lower-secondary English, roughly ages seven to eleven, and English-as-an-additional-language learners of any age, for whom the irregular list is the hardest single piece of the language.

Related: parts of speech for identifying verbs in the first place, and sentence building for putting them to work.