When someone from the SG Learning Designers Circle, a FB group for teachers in Singapore, told me that when there’s a vowel before the consonant ‘y’, we just add ‘-ed’ to make the past tense form of the verb. Honestly, I had completely forgotten about this rule.

Anyway, my mind sprang to action, so today I launched my first-ever inquiry-based English lesson.

Actually, the task was very simple. Why do we just add ‘-ed’ to play/annoy/delay instead of adding ‘-ied’? But various obstacles served to make my task more challenging. For one, i insisted that each group had to comprise two boys and two girls, which was a tall order for this class whereby alliances were drawn across gender lines (just have to drop in a reference to Survivor). For another, I rarely gave them groupwork, so they wouldn’t quite know how to discuss with one another.

So this lesson was bound to fail. But luckily, there was a brave soul in the class who was willing to try. “The letter before y is a,” she said tentatively. It was good enough for me to refute her hypothesis and give the class a generous hint. Just what do ‘a’ and ‘o’ have in common?

It was an excruciating process, much like pulling teeth. And boys displaying their bravado and pretending to box each other didn’t help matters. But persistence is my middle name, so slowly and surely, every group came to derive the rule themselves, with targetted prompting from me.

Well I don’t know how many of them will remember this rule. Guess tomorrow’s lesson will reveal their understanding, but since some of them don’t know AEIOU are vowels, I am pretty confident that they would have retained this part. Otherwise, hopefully they felt the different flavour of this lesson and experienced what it felt like to be provoked to think at least.