Goed, Eated, Teached: Why Children Get the Past Tense Wrong in English

3 October 2026 · by Larry

Your child writes “Yesterday I goed to my grandmother’s house.” You see the red pen, and you see the word “went” written above it, and you think: but she knows that. She said “went” at dinner last week.

She probably does know it. This is one of the most common English mistakes in Primary 3, and it is a more interesting mistake than it looks. It is not a child who has not learned the rule. It is very often a child who has learned the rule too well.

Why “goed” is a sign of learning, not of not learning

The ordinary rule for the past tense is to add -ed: walk becomes walked, play becomes played. A child who has absorbed that rule starts applying it everywhere, including to verbs that do not follow it. So go becomes “goed”, eat becomes “eated”, teach becomes “teached”. Young children often say these forms aloud, even after using the correct form earlier, and it is a well-known stage in how children learn a language: the child has noticed a pattern and is trusting it.

That matters for how you respond. The child does not need the rule explained again. She needs to learn that a short list of very common verbs are exceptions, and that the list simply has to be remembered, one verb at a time.

The home language can add a second reason

In many Singapore homes, the language spoken is not Standard English. In Singlish, and in Mandarin and several other languages spoken here, the verb often does not change to show the time. Time is shown by another word instead: “yesterday”, “already”, “last week”. So “Yesterday I go market” is perfectly clear in speech at home. It is only on the school page that it becomes a mistake.

I am not saying that is the cause for your child. I am saying it is worth listening for. If the slip is “I walk to school yesterday” (no ending at all) rather than “I goed” (the wrong ending), it points to a different cause, and the help is a little different. We come to that below.

Four different slips that all lose the same mark

Look through a few marked pieces and sort the past tense errors into these groups. The mark lost is the same, but the cause is not.

• The over-eager ending: goed, eated, teached, sleeped, cutted. The child knows there is a past tense and is using the main rule on a verb that is an exception.
• No change at all: “Yesterday my sister walk to the market.” The time word is there, but the verb has not moved. This is the one the home language can cause, and it is also the one that appears when a child is writing quickly.
• The wrong form of an irregular verb: “I seen a rainbow.” Here the child has mixed up two forms of the same verb. “Saw” stands on its own. “Seen” only works with has, have or had in front of it.
• A past tense that does not match the time word: “Last Friday he leave early.” Every word is spelt correctly. The child has not looked at “last Friday” and asked what it means for the verb.

Sorting them matters because they need different help. More drilling of the irregular list will not fix a child who is ignoring the time word. Reminding a child to check the time word will not help one who genuinely does not know the past of “teach”.

The irregular verbs: a short list, learned in use

There is no clever trick for irregular verbs. They are remembered by hearing and using them. But the list a Primary 3 child meets is short and repeats constantly. These are the ones StudyLab’s English questions lean on, so they are a fair picture of what to expect:

• go → went
• eat → ate
• sleep → slept
• teach → taught
• see → saw
• bring → brought
• leave → left
• cut → cut (it does not change at all, which is why “cutted” is wrong)

Do not give your child the whole list to memorise in one sitting. Pick two the child actually gets wrong in her own writing, and use them aloud for a few days.

What helps

• Say it before writing it. Ask: “What did you do yesterday?” and let her answer aloud. A child who says “I went to the library” correctly in speech but writes “goed” is telling you the knowledge is there and the writing is running ahead of it.
• Teach one habit: find the time word first. “Yesterday”, “last week”, “in the holidays”. Underline it, then ask whether the verb agrees with it. This catches the “no change at all” slip, which is the most common one in fast writing.
• Read the sentence aloud, slowly, with the verb. “Yesterday I goed.” Most children can hear that it is wrong, even when they cannot say why. Reading aloud turns an eye problem into an ear problem, and the ear is usually better.
• Keep a tiny “my exceptions” list. Not twenty verbs. Two or three that the child has actually got wrong, written on a card and kept in the front of the exercise book. Cross one off when it has been right in three pieces of writing.
• Read together, and notice. A story is usually written in the past tense. Every irregular verb in it is a free example in context. Pointing at one “ate” in a story is worth more than reciting a list.

What does not help

• Correcting every spoken slip at the dinner table. Children who are corrected constantly in speech tend to say less. Save the correcting for the page.
• Telling her to “just remember”. A rule she already follows too enthusiastically does not need repeating, and the irregular verbs need practice, not instruction.
• Copying out the past tense of forty verbs. It feels productive and it is mostly forgotten by the next day. A few verbs, used in sentences the child makes up, last longer.
• Treating it as carelessness. If the child writes “goed”, she is not careless. She is applying a rule she was taught. The careless mistakes piece makes the same point about maths: the label hides what actually went wrong.

A five-minute check you can do at home

Take one page of her recent writing, a composition or a journal entry, and highlight every verb that describes something that already happened. Then go through them one at a time with a pencil.

• Is the verb the right form for the time word, or the time of the story?
• If it is wrong, is it an extra ending, no change, or a mixed-up form?
• If it is an irregular verb, would she say it correctly aloud? Ask her.

Usually the page shows one pattern, not four. That tells you where to put the next ten minutes. If the same verb keeps appearing, it goes on the little exceptions card. If every verb is missing its ending, the time-word habit is the thing to practise. If the writing is mostly fine and only the occasional word slips, it is probably a quick-writing slip, and reading the work through once before handing it in will catch most of it. The spelling list piece describes a similar habit for words that get lost a few days after Friday’s test, and reading fluently but losing comprehension marks covers the reading side of the same English paper.

Where this fits in the school year

On StudyLab, the simple past tense is one of three Primary 3 English topics, alongside subject–verb agreement and joining words. The level-by-level guide describes the year as the point where English grows beyond a single word: grammar becomes something you judge across the whole sentence, not one gap at a time. In Primary 4 the tenses carry on with the continuous form (is running, was playing), and Primary 5 adds the present perfect, which is where “I seen” becomes “I have seen”.

If a few minutes of practice would help, the free English practice has Past Tense and Spot the Error questions in the style of a school paper, and the answer comes with a one-line reason, such as “Go is irregular, its past tense is went, never goed”. The English topics level by level shows what comes before and after. What each school expects in each year can differ, so check your child’s own workbook; the MOE primary English syllabus on moe.gov.sg is the official source.

And if she writes “goed” again next week, take it as a good sign. She is using a rule. The next job is only to show her where the rule stops.