3rd grade irregular past tense verbs worksheets
Irregular verbs form the past without -ed: teach/taught, catch/caught, fly/flew, swim/swam. Third graders expand their set beyond the everyday verbs and get faster at rejecting overregularized forms like "teached."
Free printable PDF worksheet, aligned to Common Core L.3.1.d.
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The kind of sentences you'll fix
Write the past tense of the verb in parentheses in the blank.
-
Jade (get) a gold sticker on her spelling test yesterday.
Fixed: Jade got a gold sticker on her spelling test yesterday.
- The hungry goats (eat) every carrot in the bucket this morning.
- At the nature center yesterday, Noor (hold) a corn snake for the first time.
Every print pulls a fresh set of sentences at this level, so a make-up test or a second sibling never gets the same sheet.
What's on each sheet
- Fix it. Write the past tense of the verb in parentheses in the blank. 8 sentences to fix per page.
- Choose the word. Circle the letter of the correct past tense verb. The word in parentheses is the verb to change. 10 questions per page.
Every version prints on US Letter or A4, with its answer key on the last page.
How to teach this
Group verbs by their change pattern rather than alphabetically: sing/sang, swim/swam, ring/rang in one session; catch/caught, teach/taught in another. The patterns give students something to hold on to. Keep the time cue habit: the word "yesterday" at the front of a sentence is the signal to reach for the past form.
Watch for: Adding -ed to everything (goed, runned) is a smart guess that happens to be wrong for these verbs. It means the child has learned the regular rule; now they need the exceptions. Some past forms need a helper: 'she has written', not 'she has wrote'. Our answer keys use the plain past on these sheets.
Common questions about irregular past tense verbs
- Is there a trick for learning irregular verbs?
- Grouping by pattern helps more than memorizing a list: sing/sang, ring/rang, swim/swam share a vowel change; catch/caught and teach/taught share another. Practice one family at a time, then mix them on a worksheet to check retention.
- Why do the worksheets always include a time word like "yesterday"?
- The time cue forces the past tense, so exactly one answer is correct. It also builds the real-life habit: when writing about the past, the verb has to change. Without the cue, several forms could be defensible and the practice gets mushy.
Related worksheets
- 2nd grade irregular past tense verbs A step easier, same skill
- 4th grade irregular past tense verbs A step harder, same skill
- 3rd grade adverbs of how, when, and where Same grade, nearby skill
- 3rd grade articles (a, an, the) Same grade, nearby skill
- 3rd grade collective nouns Same grade, nearby skill
- Irregular past tense verbs, all grades The full progression
- All 3rd grade English worksheets Every skill at this level
- All 3rd grade worksheets Everything at this level
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Aligned to Common Core L.3.1.d. Reviewed by the One more sheet team. Content version 137, updated August 2026.
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