Teaching the Simple Past in Years 5-6: Australian Planning Guide

In an Australian classroom, the simple past fits best as a short unit of five to eight lessons in Year 5 or 6, taught in one term as part of your English program. The content sits closest to the Language strand of the Australian Curriculum v9 English, where students learn how verb forms and tense shape meaning in texts. This is a planning note, and it does not claim any alignment or endorsement.

Where it fits in the term

Plan it as a block of two weeks, with three short lessons a week, or spread it across a term as a regular grammar slot. Because each learning path works on its own, you can teach one path before a writing task and another after it. If your class writes recounts, place the lessons on time markers and the short past-time story directly before the recount.

The material in the Simple Past unit has five paths: yesterday and time markers, regular verbs, irregular verbs, questions and negatives, and a short past-time story. Each path follows the same four steps of explanation, image observation, a practice task, and a transfer task, followed by a project and learning check.

A sample five-week rotation

• Week 1: time markers and regular verbs. Students write three sentences about yesterday and complete four sentences with played, visited, walked, and helped.
• Week 2: irregular verbs. Students tell a three-sentence story with went, saw, and had.
• Week 3: questions and negatives, using did or did not with the base form.
• Week 4: the short past-time story, with six sentences about an invented day.
• Week 5: project work, learning check, and reflection.

Each lesson can use the 5, 20, 10 rhythm: five minutes of opening, twenty exploring, ten consolidating. If your timetable runs in 50 or 60 minute blocks, double the explore block and add a writing task.

Support for EAL/D learners

Many Australian classrooms include students learning English as an additional language or dialect, and the unit's support tools suit them well. Sentence starters give a frame for the first sentence. Word cards for common verbs let students point and match before they have to write. A shared image description lets a group talk about what they can see in the illustration before anyone writes. The teacher guide also suggests reading texts aloud and accepting oral answers or symbol cards.

The illustrations are AI-generated prompts for discussion, so use them to start conversation. They are not documentary photographs.

Making it local

The book's own examples are short and neutral, so it is easy to swap in your own. Ask students to write about a weekend at the beach, a school sports carnival, or a trip on the train. Keep the structure of the task and change only the content. When students tell their own stories, the verbs matter to them.

For extra grammar consolidation, a Grade 5 grammar practice set works alongside the unit. The title uses the American term "Grade 5", which corresponds to Year 5 in Australian schools.

Mixed-ability classes

For students ready for more, the guide offers three extensions: test a borderline case, build a counterexample to a rule, or compare two solutions to the same task. A student might compare two versions of the same story and decide which one makes the order of events clearer. Pair these students with others during the consolidate block, so the explaining benefits both sides.

Checking progress

Use a one-sentence exit ticket after each path: state the main idea and give a new example. The project asks students to explain one path to another student with a heading, two examples, and a question. The guide's five criteria are accurate terms, examples explained well, a meaningful question, a readable layout with a useful image, and feedback applied.

The learning check asks for one sentence and one example for each topic, and a topic the student wants to practise. The guide suggests using it as feedback, not as a grade, which fits well with ongoing teacher judgement against your school's reporting approach.

Next steps

If you want to see the pages before planning your term, the unit page shows the full contents. The same page structure is used across the other grammar units, so students recognise the routine when you move to a new topic.

For schools that want to cover sentence types, past tense, pronouns, and German in one set, the four-unit language bundle groups them together.

Related reading from the Teacher Hub

• Checking Simple Past Understanding: Exit Tickets, Project, Support
• Why Students Write 'Did You Went': Fixing Simple Past Errors
• How to Teach Subject and Object Pronouns in Grades 3–6