home educator

Hello. How do you teach children when and why one should use the perfect aspect of a verb? I am trying to teach my kids irregular verbs and to do so must also teach present, past tense and perfect aspect. Present and past tenses are easy enough to explain, but perfect aspect is tricky. Somehow I was taught these rules long ago and it annoys me when adults do not use the proper form of an irregular verb. (Also, kudos to whichever teacher got these irregular verb forms to stick in my head!) Finally, at what age would a child be taught the past participle or perfect aspect form of irregular verbs? Thanks!

[Tdol]

If you contrast the two aspects, the progressive (or continuous) aspect shows that something is incomplete and the perfect shows some form of completion. They both have a present and a past form depending on whether the completion, or lack of it, is relevant or related to now or to a time in the past. There's a lot of debate and disagreement about how many tenses there are in English, but I think the two-tense model has an elegant clarity- we have the simple, progressive and perfect forms of the present and the past, and even the perfect progressive for partial completion.