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Conditionals: Verb Tense in “If” Clauses

Curated and Reviewed by Lesson Planet

"If you give a mouse a cookie, then he's going to ask for a glass of milk." These iconic words from Laura Numeroff's classic tale offer a great example of conditionals, a topic covered in the handout as part of a larger writing series related to citation, style, and sentence level concerns. The line from If You Give a Mouse a Cookie represents an example of a first conditional, but the handout also covers zero, second, and third conditionals.

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CCSS: Adaptable
Instructional Ideas
  • Challenge learners come up with silly scenarios, such as "If you forgot your homework, you would have to jog three miles around the school."
  • Mix up different parts of sentences and have scholars try to match them up using the correct time references
Classroom Considerations
  • Requires an understanding of basic verb tenses 
Pros
  • Uses one consistent example among each type to help make the differences clear
Cons
  • Lacks an overview or summary that shows where this skill is likely to appear in writing