Students in middle school already know how the basic tenses work: Past and present tense are already being used in their vocabulary. While middle school students grasp tense in speech, their writing may suffer from lack of consistency in tense as well as issues with subject and verb agreement. Introduce tense and subject and verb agreement with easy words such as run, ran and running. Teach a mini lesson and reinforce it with worksheets. Once students grasp the concepts, have them complete a short paragraph using the word tenses learned to assess for tense mastery. Reward students with praise if they get the assessment correct. Once they grasp the basics, focus on the more difficult tenses, such as perfect, future perfect and progressive.
Incorporate technology and play into your lessons on tense by using online grammar games as middle school students enjoy games and the chance to compete. Once students have grasped the basics, introduce games that provide increasing levels of complexity and focus on the more difficult tenses. Split your classes into teams and have them compete using online jeopardy games and word scrambles, for example. Use the games to reinforce your classroom teaching by assigning a certain number of minutes each day or week and check that students are moving to more difficult levels as they gain mastery of the more complex tenses.
Provide extra help to struggling middle school students by using scaffold assignments. Prepare tense worksheets with some of the correct tense answer choices pre-populated and have students complete the rest. For example, present a sentence fill-in that states, "Today, I will have been walking for ten hours straight." Provide this to the student to correctly finish this sentence, "Today, I_____have______walking for ten hours straight." This type of exercise provides students who are still struggling to complete harder verb tenses with extra support and guidance. As you scaffold and build on their ability, the students can complete their work and eventually complete assignments independently.
As you move on to literature and reading, give students mini tense reviews using the middle school texts that they are currently studying. Or, use a piece of literature and alter some of the verbs to make them incorrect. At the end of the lesson, have middle school students identify errors in tense as part of their warm up or daily activity.