Do you have any students in speech therapy struggling with verbs?

There are a couple of tricky things about verbs!

1. Irregular verbs are basically memorization! If there’s no rule, you just need to hear and use the word over and over again until it’s cemented in your vocabulary.
2. You can teach them in isolation, but you have to work on generalization too! If you’ve ever had a student with speech therapy verb goals, you might have noticed them learning verbs during drill, but not using them in conversation.

I’ve written about a really simple, evidence-based procedure for tackling past tense verbs. Check it out if you haven’t yet!

Verbs aren’t just tricky for students either! In grad school, I had a session with a client with aphasia. I noticed he was having difficulty deciding when to use the words ‘do’ and ‘did’. In order to help him visually see different between ‘do’ and ‘did’, I put together a little visual. Then, later in the session he made the same error between ‘were’ and ‘are’.

After session, I went into the grad room, and made this handy visual! It visually shows when to use ‘do’ vs ‘did’, ‘were’ vs ‘are’ vs ‘will be’, ‘was’ vs ‘is’ vs ‘will be’, and ‘was’ vs ‘am’ vs ‘will be’. Later in the week, another one of my clients made an error with ‘were’ and ‘are’ again, and I was prepared!

Sometimes a simple visual is all your student or client needs to practice this important skill beyond drill cards. Pull out this chart during book reading, another structured activity, or even during conversation. Eventually you’ll want to fade use of the visual for true generalization!

Feel free to download my Basic Verb Conjugation Chart for Speech Therapy FREEBIE in my TPT store.

As always, email with me any comments! Thank you for your support.