Two Truths and a Lie: Past Tense Edition

7 March 2012

My 6th graders have been working on the past tense in their current unit "Greek Myths"--which is exciting because there are so many interesting activities that I can do with them using the past tense.

Unfortunately, they are all still pretty new to the past tense so it seemed better to start with something more straightforward.

So we played Two Truths and a Lie--which I actually did with them at the beginning of the year using the verb "have got." However, this time, each student had to write three sentences about their childhood (the not too distant past even though they would like to think otherwise)--two of which were true and one of which was false.

I wrote:

• When I was little, I played football (of the soccer variety). 
• When I was little, my favorite color was green.
• When I was little, I liked spinach. 

Everyone immediately guessed that I was lying about playing soccer as a kid, but I told them that I did indeed play soccer when I was little. In fact, my mom was our coach and we were the Bumblebees.

The next obvious answer was that I liked spinach as a kid. This was the lie.  

I heard the usual sorts of sentences as well as a few weird ones.

• When I was little, I played with barbies.
• When I was little, I was an Olympic champion.
• When I was little, I rode a horse.
• When I was little, I spoke English very well.
• When I was little, I liked bananas. 

In order to make things more exciting, we turned it into a competition--dividing the class into two teams. Each team sent a representative to the front of the room to read his or her sentences. Then, the representative from the other team had to guess which one was the lie. If he or she chose correctly, the team received a point--which they loved.