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Teaching children to locate their writing clearly in time can be complicated, as there are several ways to do this. The most important are:
- A starter word or phrase related to time. Next week, I am on holiday. Once upon a time, there was... Today is my birthday.
- The form of a verb - Marley was dead, to begin with. (Dickens, A Christmas Carol)
- Context. O'Dowd goes in command. (Thackeray, Vanity Fair.)
Very often, the first sentence we write sets a time zone of present or past. Future is less common, as we don't know what will happen in the future and so tend only to visit it briefly. The zone may be set by the form of the first verb - Jack is, or was, waiting for a bus. It may also be set by a starter word or phrase. Yesterday, for example, puts us in the past zone, Tomorrow in the future. There is usually a comma after the starter word or phrase.
A good way of teaching this may be to put it in the context of Ros Wilson's and Alan Peat's work on sentence construction. Ros Wilson's idea that "If they can't say it, they can't write it," can be used to have children construct sentences in the past tense - variations on Alan Peat's "exciting sentences", and to use starters/time phrases (dubbed, confusingly, "adverbials" by academic linguists) to move from one zone to another. Straying out of zone without one of these signposts causes the reader to lose track of time, and so causes confusion.
I'm happy to collaborate with any teachers interested in developing the approach, in English or in other languages.