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Both developing student writers as well as professionals struggle with eliminating (or reducing) the overuse of the forms of the “to be” verbs: is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been. Any teacher knows that developing writers overdo the “to be” verbs in their writing. The narrative genre forgives the overuse more so than does the essay genre. After all, dialogue needs authenticity and speakers overuse the “to be” verbs even more than writers.

Students especially struggle when revising these “to be” verbs: was and were.

“Mr. Pennington, it is impossible to write this essay on what caused the Civil War without using was and were,” complained one frustrated eighth grader.

I turned to page 79 in my well-highlighted and dog-eared copy of Kenneth Stamp’s The Causes of the Civil War and read, ““Northern abolitionists probably exaggerated the physical cruelties that the Southern masters inflicted upon their slaves. Southern “fire-eaters” doubtless distorted the true character of Northern Yankees. Politicians in both sections kept the country in constant turmoil by and whipped up popular emotions for the selfish purpose of winning elections.”

Now I might disagree with Stamp’s sympathetic take on the exaggeration of slaveholder cruelty, but he sure can write. And, no, he did not have to use the was and were in the above excerpt. He did use a were in the next line 🙂

However, we do need to empathize with developing writers as they seek out vivid, “show me” verbs to replace the oft-used “to be” verbs. After all, six of the eight “to be” verbs appear in the top 43 highest frequency English words lists: is, are, was, were, be, been.

To help students eliminate the “to be” verbs, I’ve developed five strategies (See the detailed approach here) and specific lessons to apply each strategy. Let’s use third strategy: the Convert strategy to eliminate was and were by converting them to strong _t verbs. The _t verbs pack a punch because they are irregular in the past tense and past participle forms. The lesson will include a helpful worksheet.

Lesson Plan: Common Core State Standards W.3, 4, 5  L.2, 3 and Depth of Knowledge Levels 1, 2, 3 (20−30 minutes)

Behavioral Objective: Students will demonstrate the ability to identify the eight “to be” verbs, explain the proper functions of these verbs, and convert the weak was and were verbs to the stronger _t verbs on the formative assessment.

1. Introduce the lesson by telling students that their task is to learn how to replace weak “to be” verbs with stronger verbs. Remind students that a “to be” verb links to the subject (the do-er) of the sentence as a state of being. You might want to reference this Parts of Speech article with my Parts of Speech Song to review the three basic functions of verbs (physical action, mental action, state of being). Tell students that writers generally avoid using “to be” verbs in essays. “To be” verbs can appear more frequently in narrative writing.

2. Write the eight “to be” verbs on the board: is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been.

3. Say,”‘to be’ verbs are not always bad; sometimes writers must use ‘to be’ verbs to communicate exactly what the writer wants to say. A ‘to be’ verb  performs one of these five functions: (Write this list on the board, adjusting or deleting the grammatical terms to the level and prior knowledge of your students.) Any questions?”

• Exists−Is there any trouble? Yes, I am he (predicate nominative).
• Happens−The meetings are over.
• Locates−He was at the birthday party.
• Identifies−Those children were friendly (predicate adjective).
• Describes−That could be scary (helping verb)! He is being helpful (progressive tense). Those girls have been so mean (perfect tense).

4. Say, “Let’s learn the Convert strategy to replace weak ‘to be’ verbs, which don’t serve these functions. Look at this sentence on the board: (Write the following sentence.) Juan was bringing the salad to the potluck. (Point to the list of ‘to be’ verbs). Which ‘to be’ verb appears in this sentence? Whole class answer on three (pause): 1, 2, 3 ‘was.’ Circle the ‘was’ on the board.”

5. Write this sentence on the board: Juan brought the salad to the potluck.

6. Ask, “How did I substitute the was in the sentence? How does each linking verb affect the meaning of the sentence?” (For older students, you may wish to explain that the was and were _ing verb construction is known as the past progressive form and indicates a continuing action that was going on in the past, while the _t verbs indicate a completed action that happened at one point in time.

7. Say, “We need some practice using the Convert strategy to replace weak was and were verbs with stronger _t verbs (Print and pass out the Convert Was and Were _ing to _t Verb Worksheet to each student and read the directions out loud.) Complete items #s 1−10, but don’t complete the formative assessment at the bottom.”

Note: For older students, you may wish to tell them that the British tend to use more _t verbs than their American cousins. Brits will say “He leant against the wall.” Americans will say, “He leaned against the wall.” Also, although still proper usage, the blest, burnt, dreampt, leapt, learnt, slipt, smelt, spelt, and spilt are anachronistic.

8. After most of the students have finished the worksheet, display the answer sheet and direct students to self-correct. Then say, “Now complete the formative assessment at the bottom of your worksheet.” (Tell students to pass in the worksheet and review to see if your student have mastered this lesson objective.

 

*****

Teaching Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics (Grades 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and High School) are full-year, traditional, grade-level grammar, usage, and mechanics programs with plenty of remedial practice to help students catch up while they keep up with grade-level standards. Twice-per-week, 30-minute, no prep lessons in print or interactive Google slides with a fun secret agent theme. Simple sentence diagrams, mentor texts, video lessons, sentence dictations. Plenty of practice in the writing context. Includes biweekly tests and a final exam.

Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics Interactive Notebook (Grades 4‒8) is a full-year, no prep interactive notebook without all the mess. Twice-per-week, 30-minute, no prep grammar, usage, and mechanics lessons, formatted in Cornell Notes with cartoon response, writing application, 3D graphic organizers (easy cut and paste foldables), and great resource links. No need to create a teacher INB for student make-up work—it’s done for you! Plus, get remedial worksheets, biweekly tests, and a final exam.

Syntax in Reading and Writing is a function-based, sentence level syntax program, designed to build reading comprehension and increase writing sophistication. The 18 parts of speech, phrases, and clauses lessons are each leveled from basic (elementary) to advanced (middle and high school) and feature 5 lesson components (10–15 minutes each): 1. Learn It!  2. Identify It!  3. Explain It! (analysis of challenging sentences) 4. Revise It! (kernel sentences, sentence expansion, syntactic manipulation) 5. Create It! (Short writing application with the syntactic focus in different genre).

Get the Diagnostic Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics Assessments, Matrix, and Final Exam FREE Resource:

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Progressive Verb Tense               

Play the quick video lesson HERE and click the upper left back arrow to return to this lesson.

Common Core Language Standard 1

As with the perfect verb tense, the progressive verb tense shows a different sense of time and condition. Many events or situations in life don’t just happen once at one time, but happen over a period of time. The English language allows us to communicate this ongoing action quite easily.

Now let’s read the grammar and usage lesson and study the examples.

The past progressive verb tense shows an action that took place over a period of time in the past or a past action which was happening when another action took place. The past progressive uses was + the base form of the verb + “__ing” and were + the base form of the verb + “__ing.” Examples: I was waiting for him at home. John and Rob were eating lunch when Lee arrived.

The present progressive verb tense shows an action that takes place over a period of time in the present or an action taking place at the same time the statement is written. The present progressive uses I am + the base form of the verb + “__ing,” is + the base form of the verb + “__ing” and are + the base form of the verb + “__ing.” Examples: I am walking to school each day. Sara and Rosalyn are talking about the new girl at school.

The future progressive verb tense shows an ongoing action that will be completed over a period of time or a continuous action that will be repeated and not completed. The future progressive uses will be + the base form of the verb + “__ing.” Examples: We will be going on the field trip tomorrow. Patrick and I will be spending lots of time together.

Now circle or highlight what is right and revise what is wrong according to grammar and usage lesson.

Practice: He is thinking that Ben will been asking, but he was hoped that Ben won’t.

Let’s check the Practice Answers.

Grammar and Usage Practice Answers: He is thinking that Ben will be asking, but he was hoping that Ben won’t.

Now let’s apply what we have learned

Writing Application: Write three of your own sentences using the same base form of the verb: the first one as a past progressive, the second one as a present progressive, and the third one as a future progressive.

This writing opener is part of a comprehensive language conventions lesson from the Grammar, Mechanics, Spelling, and Vocabulary   Grades 4‒8 programs.

*****

Teaching Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics (Grades 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and High School) are full-year, traditional, grade-level grammar, usage, and mechanics programs with plenty of remedial practice to help students catch up while they keep up with grade-level standards. Twice-per-week, 30-minute, no prep lessons in print or interactive Google slides with a fun secret agent theme. Simple sentence diagrams, mentor texts, video lessons, sentence dictations. Plenty of practice in the writing context. Includes biweekly tests and a final exam.

Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics Interactive Notebook (Grades 4‒8) is a full-year, no prep interactive notebook without all the mess. Twice-per-week, 30-minute, no prep grammar, usage, and mechanics lessons, formatted in Cornell Notes with cartoon response, writing application, 3D graphic organizers (easy cut and paste foldables), and great resource links. No need to create a teacher INB for student make-up work—it’s done for you! Plus, get remedial worksheets, biweekly tests, and a final exam.

Syntax in Reading and Writing is a function-based, sentence level syntax program, designed to build reading comprehension and increase writing sophistication. The 18 parts of speech, phrases, and clauses lessons are each leveled from basic (elementary) to advanced (middle and high school) and feature 5 lesson components (10–15 minutes each): 1. Learn It!  2. Identify It!  3. Explain It! (analysis of challenging sentences) 4. Revise It! (kernel sentences, sentence expansion, syntactic manipulation) 5. Create It! (Short writing application with the syntactic focus in different genre).

Get the Diagnostic Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics Assessments, Matrix, and Final Exam FREE Resource:

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Verbs come in many forms in English. Knowing the definition of this basic part of speech only gets us so far. We do need to know what we are talking about when we refer to verbs. Some common language of instruction only makes sense. Even the die-hard writing process folk, never fans of direct grammar instruction, have always agreed that teaching the definitions of the parts of speech a must. Ask English-language arts teachers what they wish their students knew about grammar and they will universally answer “parts of speech.”

We know that students have learned these parts of speech ad nauseam, but why can’t they remember them?  Have their teachers been negligent or unskilled? Or is repeated instruction the only way to learn grammar? Is it the problem of learning grammar divorced from the context of writing?

Following is an instructional approach guaranteed to interrupt this forgetting cycle with definitions of key verb components and clear examples.

1. DIE AR

DEFINE Help students memorize the definitions of the key verb components. Rote memory is fundamental to higher order thinking. Use memory tricks, repetition, and even songs. Check out the Parts of Speech Song. Test and re-test to ensure mastery.

IDENTIFY Help students identify verb components in practice examples and real text. Using quality, un-canned and authentic mentor text, such as famous literary quotations and short passages/poetry kills two birds with one stone: identification practice and sentence modeling.

EDIT Help students practice error analysis for each verb component by editing text that contains correct and incorrect usage. Finding out what is wrong does help clarify what is right. But don’t limit your instruction, as in Daily Oral Language, to this step. Students need the mentor texts and writing practice to master their verb components. Grammar taught in the context of reading and writing translates into long-term memory and application.

APPLY Help students their knowledge of verbs correctly in targeted practice sentences. Sentence frames are one solid instructional method to practice application. For example, for infinitive verbs…

To ________________ how ________________ a two-wheeler bike, a child must first practice how ________________ themselves ________________ falling.

Possible response: To learn how to ride a two-wheeler bike, a child must first practice how to balance themselves to avoid falling.

REVISE Help students understand the importance and relevance of learning verbs by revising their own authentic writing. Stress using what they have learned about verb components to improve coherence, sentence variety, author voice, word choice, clarity, and style. Make sure to share brilliant revisions that reflect these improvements as your own mentor texts. Post them on your walls and refer to them often to reinforce definition, identification, and writing style.

2. Assessments

Diagnostic assessments of key grammatical features, such as verbs, serves two purposes: First, the results inform what to teach and how much time to allocate to direct instruction. It may be that one class tends to have mastery re: past tense verbs, linking verbs, and infinitives but weaknesses in helping verbs, future tense verbs, and subject-verb agreement. A different class may have a different set of strengths and weaknesses. Why so? It just seems to work that way. Second, diagnostic assessments provide an individual baseline upon which to build learning. Sharing this data with students is crucial. Students need to know what they know and what they don’t know to motivate their learning and see the personal relevance of the instructional task. Check out my favorite whole class diagnostic grammar assessment under Free ELA/Reading Assessments.

Formative assessments need to be designed to measure true mastery of the grammatical concept. So, a useful formative assessment of verb components must be comprehensive, including all steps of the DIE AR process. The purpose of formative assessment is to identify relative strengths and weaknesses of both instruction and learning. Simply giving a unit test as a summative assessment only satisfies the teacher (and colleagues) that the teacher has covered the subject, i.e. teaching verbs. Far better to use the data to affect instruction. Good teachers re-teach judiciously and differentiate instruction according to test data.

3. Differentiated Instruction

Differentiated instruction should focus on relative weaknesses. A good recording matrix for formative assessments will clearly inform the teacher as to who lacks mastery over which verb components and how many students need remediation. Individual, paired, and small group instruction with targeted independent practice makes sense. A workshop design in which the teacher distributes worksheets, monitors practice, and uses mini-conferences to assess mastery ensures effective remediation. Differentiated instruction doesn’t have to be a planning or management nightmare.

Verbs Instructional Scope and Sequence

A verb shows a physical or mental action or it describes a state of being.

Examples:

Physical action: She works long hours

Mental action: but knows that

State of being: there is more to life than work.

Linking verbs connect a subject with a noun, pronoun, or predicate adjective and show either physical or mental actions.

Examples:

He looks like the man (noun). She sounds like her (pronoun). The guilty one is he (predicate adjective).

Linking verbs include the following: appear, become, feel, grow, keep, look, remain, seem, smell, sound, seem, stay, and taste. Other linking verbs that describe a state of being include the “to be” verbs: is, am, are, was, were, be, being, and been.

Helping verbs help a verb and are placed in front of the verb.

Examples: I had heard the bell.

Helping verbs include the “to be” verbs, the “to do” verbs: do, does, did, the “to have” verbs: has, have, had, as well as can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, and would.

Past Verb Tense

The past tense simply adds on a __d or __ed ending to the base form. The past tense is used for an action that took place at a specific time or times.

Examples: I found the missing key. She started her homework.

Another form of the past verb tense is the past progressive. The past progressive describes an action that took place over a period of time in the past.

Example: Amanda was entertaining her guests when her grandmother arrived.

The past perfect verb tense refers to a physical or mental action or a state of being that was completed before a specific time in the past. The past perfect is formed with had + the past participle (a verb ending in d, ed, or en for regular verbs).

Example: Cecil and Rae had finished their study by the time that the teacher passed out the test study guide.

Another form of the present perfect verb tense is the past perfect progressive. The past perfect progressive describes a past action that was interrupted by another past event. It is formed with had been and the _ing form of the verb.

Example: My dad had been driving for two hours in the snowstorm when the Highway Patrol put up the “Chains Required” sign.

Present Verb Tense

The present verb tense uses the base form of the verb and adjusts to a singular third-person subject by usually adding on an ending s. Plural subjects require verbs in the base form.

Examples: He finds the missing key. They find the missing key.

The present verb tense has the following uses:

• To generalize about a physical or mental action or a state of being

Example: We look for the best candidates for this office.

• To describe a physical or mental action that happens over and over again

Example: He plays the game like it is a matter of life or death.

• To refer to a future time in dependent clauses (clauses beginning with after, as soon as, before, if, until, when), when will is used in the independent clause

Example: After she leaves for school, we will turn her bedroom into a guestroom.

• To discuss literature, art, movies, theater, and music—even if the content is set in the past or the creator is no longer alive

Example: Thomas Jefferson states that “all men are created equal.”

Another form of the present verb tense is the present progressive. The present progressive describes an ongoing action happening or existing now.

Example: She is walking faster than her friend.

The present perfect verb tense refers to a physical or mental action or a state of being happening or existing before the present. The present perfect is formed with has or have + the past participle (a verb ending in d, ed, or en for regular verbs).

Example: He has already started his science project.

The present perfect verb tense has the following uses: To describe an action that took place at some unidentified time in the past that relates to the present.

Example: The students have studied hard for today’s test.

To describe an action that began in the past but continues to the present.

Example: The teachers have taught these standards for five years.

Another form of the present perfect verb tense is the present perfect progressive. The present perfect progressive describes the length of time an action has been in progress up to the present time. It is formed with have been and the _ing form of the verb.

Example: The students have been writing for over an hour.

Future Tense

The future verb tense places the action of the sentence in the future. English does not have endings for the future verb tense. Instead, use the helping verbs such as the modals: can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, and would + the base verb form.

Examples: I will find the missing key. I should visit my sick friend later this week.

Another form of the future verb tense is the future progressive. The future progressive describes an ongoing action that will take place over a period of time in the future.

Example: Amanda will be taking reservations over the holidays.

The future perfect verb tense refers to a physical or mental action or a state of being that will be completed before a specific time in the future. The future perfect is formed with a helping verb such as the modals: can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, and would + has or have + the present participle (a verb ending in d, ed, or en for regular verbs).

Example: We will have walked six miles by three-o’clock this afternoon.

Another form of the future perfect verb tense is the future perfect progressive. The future perfect progressive describes the length of time an action will be in progress up to a specific time in the future. It is formed with will have been and the _ing form of the verb.

Example: The students will have been playing the same video game for two hours by the time their friends arrive.

*****

Teaching Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics (Grades 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and High School) are full-year, traditional, grade-level grammar, usage, and mechanics programs with plenty of remedial practice to help students catch up while they keep up with grade-level standards. Twice-per-week, 30-minute, no prep lessons in print or interactive Google slides with a fun secret agent theme. Simple sentence diagrams, mentor texts, video lessons, sentence dictations. Plenty of practice in the writing context. Includes biweekly tests and a final exam.

Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics Interactive Notebook (Grades 4‒8) is a full-year, no prep interactive notebook without all the mess. Twice-per-week, 30-minute, no prep grammar, usage, and mechanics lessons, formatted in Cornell Notes with cartoon response, writing application, 3D graphic organizers (easy cut and paste foldables), and great resource links. No need to create a teacher INB for student make-up work—it’s done for you! Plus, get remedial worksheets, biweekly tests, and a final exam.

Syntax in Reading and Writing is a function-based, sentence-level syntax program, designed to build reading comprehension and increase writing sophistication. The 18 parts of speech, phrases, and clauses lessons are each leveled from basic (elementary) to advanced (middle and high school) and feature 5 lesson components (10–15 minutes each): 1. Learn It!  2. Identify It!  3. Explain It! (analysis of challenging sentences) 4. Revise It! (kernel sentences, sentence expansion, syntactic manipulation) 5. Create It! (Short writing application with the syntactic focus in different genre).

Get the Diagnostic Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics Assessments, Matrix, and Final Exam FREE Resource:

Get the “To Be” Verbs Posters FREE Resource:

Get the Grammar and Mechanics Grades 4-8 Instructional Scope and Sequence FREE Resource:

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