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," matching the grade-3 standard for irregular verbs.
By grade
What students need to know
Irregular verbs don't add -ed for the past. They change: go became went, eat became ate.
This skill runs from 2nd grade through 4th grade. Pick a grade above for level-matched sentences, teaching notes, and worksheets.
Irregular Past Tense Verbs across the grades
2nd Grade
Most verbs make their past tense with -ed (jump, jumped), but irregular verbs change instead: go/went, see/saw, eat/ate. Second graders learn the everyday set through practice, choosing the real past form over the tempting -ed guess like "goed."
3rd Grade
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," matching the grade-3 standard for irregular verbs.
4th Grade
By 4th grade, the working set includes the harder changes: choose/chose, freeze/froze, tear/tore, swing/swung. Students also start separating the plain past from the past participle (wrote vs. written), a distinction that matters once perfect tenses arrive in 5th grade.