Imperfect tense in Spanish

This is a complete lesson, designed to get students to work out the endings for the imperfect tense and then apply that knowledge in several staged exercises.

It’s not easy because it forces students to look for their own clues. All the answers are in the resources, though, so students should be reminded that they only need to look for patterns.

The differentiation comes from the amount of support the student gets from the teacher, and also from pairings if you choose to use small groups.

I’ve found that this is no better at getting students to remember the endings within the lesson itself, but it has been very useful in ensuring that they can feel confident enough to work with the endings at home as part of any homework. They also seem to retain the endings much longer with an activity like this.

Obviously, if students are rusty with the endings but have been exposed the the imperfect tense before, the exercise where they have to determine which endings match each personal pronoun can be quite quick.