If you’ve seen any of my past posts you already know I LOVE Toca Boca World! In my “Toca Office” I set up a room for irregular past-tense verbs. I only have to prepare the room once (unless the game crashes, which happens only once or twice a year and only after I download a new addon).
While I always start working on irregular past-tense verbs with flash cards and use a least-to-most cueing hierarchy (unless the child needs a consistent level of support in which case I’ll start there and then gradually give them less), I switch to naturalistic/play-based activities as soon as possible to increase generalization (the child’s use of their new skills in everyday life).
For each child I’ll load the room and then do things like put the dog on the bed and say, “He’s sleeping and sleeping and sleeping,” before I take the dog off the bed and ask what he did. If that’s too hard I’ll give them a wrong answer such as, “Is it ‘sleeped’?” If that’s still too hard I’ll give them a binary choice such as, “Is it ‘slept’ or ‘sleeped’?” (I’ll switch the correct answer in the 1st or 2nd choice to avoid children answering based on a pattern).
Here’s my video tutorial for creating a room to target irregular past-tense verbs in Toca Boca world for FREE.
Here are some more ideas for using Toca Boca World in speech and language treatment.
And here are some more ideas for addressing irregular past-tense verbs during play-based activities.