How do you make a teaching aid for tenses?

Answer 1

One of the easiest things to do is draw a horizontal line (hard to do here). Put an arrow head on each end. Pointing to the left is past and pointing to the right is future. Then any where along the line - round about the middle is good - put a vertical line with an arrow head pointing down to the horizontal line, this is now (present).

Say for example you are teaching about the use of past perfect and past simple together, using the sentence 'The train had left when I arrived at the station." You can put a cross on the line on the past side of 'now'. This marks - 'arrived'- past simple. Now put another cross past this cross this is -'had left'- past perfect.

Used together this way the past perfect refers to something that happened in the past before something else (past simple) that happened in the past.