Tenses: a guide for Year 6
By Year 6, children need to recognise and use the simple, perfect and progressive forms in the past and present, and keep the tense consistent through a piece of writing. The good news is that the forms follow a small number of patterns.
Tense and form
English has two tenses that change the verb itself: present (walk, walks) and past (walked). Everything else is built by adding helping verbs. The perfect form uses have or had, and the progressive form uses a form of be with an -ing verb. The future is usually expressed with will or going to.
Children don't need to be told that English “only has two tenses”, but it explains why the SATs talk about the present perfect and past progressive: each name is a tense plus a form.
| Present | Past | |
|---|---|---|
| Simple | she writes | she wrote |
| Progressive | she is writing | she was writing |
| Perfect | she has written | she had written |
Simple present and simple past
The simple present describes habits, facts and things happening now: She walks to school. Water boils at 100°C. The simple past describes completed actions: She walked to school yesterday.
Regular verbs add -ed in the past. The difficulty is the irregular verbs, many of which are among the most common words in English: go, went; catch, caught; think, thought; bring, brought. Children who write goed or brung usually know the right form when they hear it, so saying sentences aloud helps.
The progressive form
The progressive shows an action that is ongoing. It always has two parts: a form of be and a verb ending in -ing.
- They are playing outside.Present progressive: happening now.
- I was reading when the doorbell rang.Past progressive: interrupted by another action.
- We was playing football.Plural subject needs were: we were playing.
The past progressive is often used with the simple past to show one action interrupting another. A quick timeline, with a long bar for the ongoing action and a short mark for the interruption, makes this easy to see.
The perfect form
The present perfect connects the past to now. It uses has or have with a past participle: She has finished her homework (so it's done now). The past perfect shows that something happened before another past event, using had: She had finished before tea.
- I have lost my keys.Present perfect: the keys are still lost now.
- I had lost my keys, so I climbed through the window.Past perfect: the losing happened first.
- She has went home.The past participle is gone: she has gone.
Most errors come from using the simple past form instead of the past participle: has went, had took, have ate. A short daily list of common participles (gone, taken, eaten, written, seen, been) fixes most of them.
Keeping the tense consistent
A piece of writing should stay in one tense unless there's a reason to change. Switching without a reason is one of the most frequent errors in Year 6 narratives:
- I walked into the room and see a cat.Should be saw: the rest of the sentence is past.
- I think he was right.A justified change: thinking now about something in the past.
The SATs test this by asking children to spot a verb in the wrong tense, or to rewrite a sentence in a different tense. The skill is to work out which tense the writer meant first, then check every verb against it.
How tenses are tested in the SATs
- Name the tense or form of an underlined verb, often as a tick-one question.
- Complete a sentence with the verb in a given form, such as the present perfect of to write.
- Rewrite a sentence in a different tense, changing every verb that needs it.
- Find the error in a sentence where one verb is inconsistent.
Common mistakes
- Irregular past forms: goed, catched, brung.
- Simple past instead of the past participle: has went, had took.
- Subject–verb agreement in the progressive: we was, they is.
- Forgetting the helping verb: They playing outside.
- Drifting between past and present in a story.
Teaching ideas
Timelines
Draw a timeline on the board for each new form. Bars for ongoing actions, dots for completed ones, and an arrow for “now”. Children place example sentences on the line, which makes the perfect and progressive forms concrete.
Tense switch
Read a short paragraph in the present and ask pupils to retell it in the past. They circle every verb that changed and add any irregular ones to a class list.
Spot the slip
Share a paragraph with three tense errors hidden in it. Pairs find and correct them, then discuss one place where a change of tense would be justified, such as speech or a general fact.
Participle of the day
One irregular verb a day, said aloud in all three forms (take, took, taken) and used in a present perfect sentence. Two minutes a day over a term covers every verb children commonly get wrong.
Try it: five quick questions
SATs-style questions to use as a starter or a quick check. Tap to see each answer.
Which form is the underlined verb? She was reading when the phone rang.
Show answer
Past progressive.
Complete with the present perfect of to write: Sam ___ three letters.
Show answer
Sam has written three letters.
Correct the verb: They have went to the park.
Show answer
They have gone to the park.
Find the verb in the wrong tense: We opened the box and find a key inside.
Show answer
find should be found.
Rewrite in the past progressive: The children play outside.
Show answer
The children were playing outside.
Free worksheets for this topic
Printable A4 PDFs with answers. Free to use in class or at home.
