We've been correcting Nicholas's speech patterns for a long time now, but he seems to be fine with it, so we end up doing a lot of grammar and usage work at the dinner table.
Recently I've been practicing the past tense with him, especially for irregular verbs (why do children only use irregular verbs?!). In particular, I've tried to help him figure it out through an algorithm: "today I x; yesterday I x-ed." Like most three-year-olds, he simply adds "-ed" to make the past tense (he's figured that out, at least), but has trouble with "go," "do," "make," and so on.
In any case, we were doing that the other night at dinner while he was telling us a story about playing with a shovel at school during the day. "I digged with the shovel," he proclaimed. "I dug with the shovel," I mildly corrected, hoping he'd get the past tense.
He sat pensively for a moment, then added: "Today I digged with the shovel. Yesterday I dugged with the shovel."
Getting closer, but not quite there.
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