In previous materials you learned how to describe your family and yourself, but might you describe yourself as a child? No worries, you're about to learn how to do it.
Do you remember Mariana and Alex from the Now and Then section? What they were talking about? Right! They were talking about how their grandma and cousin looked like in the past.
These are some of the sentences they probably used to express their ideas. Let's have a look at them:
- Our grandma was patient and younger ten years ago.
- Our cousin, Fernando, was skinny and shy fifteen years ago.
As you probably noticed, Mariana and Alex used the simple past form of the verb To Be, was & were to express personal information such as personality traits, emotions and some physical characteristics.
Was & were are also used to express age, nationality and occupation from a person in the past, and to describe a place or an object from the past.
Remember!
Was & were are the simple form of verb to be.
Verb to be
Now, take a look at the following information to learn the structure of the sentences when using was & were.
Let's have some practice.
This is Mark's homework. Let's help him out! First, make sure that he included all the information that he was supposed to write about. To do that, read Mark's homework and then mark the information that he included in his piece of writing.
My grandparents
I'm going to write about my grandparents. My grandfather was from Oaxaca, Mexico. My grandparents was 21 when they got married. My grandpa were responsible and honest. He was also funny and cheerful. My grandpa was a farmer and my grandmother was a housewife. My granny wasn't tall, she were medium-height with short curly hair. Her eyes were big and dark brown.
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1. Nationality |
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2. Age |
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3. Ocupation |
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4. Physical description |
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5. Personality |
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Now that you are sure that Mark fulfilled the task let's give him feedback about grammar. Read Mark's homework again, identify his grammar mistakes and rewrite Mark's homework with the corrections you made.