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Herbarium, pot, or field?

Any grammatical phenomenon, like a flower, can be represented in three ways: dried in a herbarium, growing in a flower pot, and growing in a field among other flowers in a natural environment. Using Present Perfect as an example:

1) /Herbarium/ "I have played, you have played, he has played, she has played" - this is the bare verb.

2) /Pot/ This is an exercise for a particular rule. The flower is already alive but is in artificial conditions, and there can be variations here. Exercises can be more or less communicative. For instance, looking at a list with household chores for the previous day, where ticks represent completed tasks and minuses represent incomplete ones, we play out a dialogue.

√

Wash the dishes

-

Make my bed

√

Clean my room

-

Do my homework

Have you washed the dishes yet?
Yes, I’ve just washed the dishes, but I haven’t made my bed yet.

Non-communicative sentences are those that are not connected in meaning. Here, you simply need to insert the verb in the required form, for example, "Petya was in Paris. I ate two apples. Masha didn't wash the dishes." (This exercise is intentionally presented in Russian to expose its absurdity). The disadvantage of such exercises is that when they are carried out, thought is turned off, and the verb insertion becomes purely mechanical unless, of course, you strain your imagination and recall the KVN tasks from pioneer childhood when we were asked to link a story, for instance, from movie titles. Then we could animate this exercise as follows: "Imagine, when I learned that Petya was in Paris, I ate two apples out of envy, and Masha didn’t even wash the dishes!". However, it didn't work! We went beyond the scope of the Present Perfect, delved into tense agreement, and ended up in the Past Perfect.

This is a case when the "four-hand game" approach cannot be applied, which means you can't engage emotions, play out this dialogue, or present it as a life episode. And finally, the third type:

3) /Field/ Let's head to the field. The same one we ran across, frolicking in our childhood, but now we are adults with a serious task. We take along a basket and botanical knowledge. An incredibly pleasant, captivating, and useful journey.

So, all the books we have read, from the very first fairy tales (and there are quite a few of them), we carefully store as relics, and now we return to them with a serious purpose. For example, today we are collecting verb tense forms. We're not interested in the Simple form; it’s scattered all over the field like grass. We find and put in our basket, that is, write down in a notebook, and color in the text all other forms. It's best to choose colors in the same range for each type, for example, for Continuous - from lemon to medium-yellow to bright yellow (from Past to Future), blue tones for Perfect, and green for Perfect Continuous (since green is yellow + blue). Such creative work yields excellent results because children:

- See the verb form in a natural context every time,
- Revive in memory what was read earlier, meeting idioms and bright thoughts again,
- And it's almost scientific research. Kids suddenly notice, for example, that they never needed dark green – this is a "dead" tense, and all other colors appear with very different frequencies. There's a desire to count, compare in percentage terms. Kids see that all Present and Future forms, for instance, can only be found in direct speech, except when the author addresses the reader in the second person as a conversation partner. But the Past Continuous tense - a very often encountered light yellow flower - is not scary at all but clear and appeared at the very beginning of the first fairy tale "The first little pig met a man, who was carrying a bundle of straw.", which they heard for the first time in the very first lesson.

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