Verb conjugation drills that actually stick
I spent three years watching high school Portuguese students freeze when asked to conjugate irregular verbs in real time. The pattern was always the same: they could recite tables in their sleep, but the moment you asked them to use a verb in context, their eyes went blank. So I started making these little games, laminating them, taping them to the board, and watching the exact same students eventually conjugate without thinking. Here is how that works in practice, and where it falls apart.
jogo dos verbos para imprimir
The basic format is simple enough that any teacher can set one up in under ten minutes. You take a verb table — preterite tense of ser/estar/tirar, imperfect subjunctive of common irregulars, or that whole mess of verbo haver that nobody teaches well — and you turn it into a grid where students fill in the blanks. Some versions are crossword puzzles, some are matching columns, some are just blank conjugation charts with the subject pronouns already printed. The point is the same: repetition without the boredom of a worksheet. I designed my first one around 2014, printing double-sided on cardstock and cutting them into flash cards. Each card had a subject pronoun on one side and a verb stem on the other, and students had to match them in pairs while calling out the correct conjugation. It worked, but not the way I expected. The problem was over-reliance on the printed card: once they memorized the layout, they were matching spatial positions rather than conjugating. I fixed it by shuffling the cards randomly between rounds and adding a timer that forced quick responses. That single change cut the "memorized the grid" effect by roughly seventy percent.
The most useful version I ever made was a three-column matrix. Column one had the infinitive, column two had the past participle, and column three was left blank for the students to write the future subjunctive. You would print about twenty verbs per page, include a mix of regular and the truly irregular ones (trazer, vir, pôr, estar), and staple them into a small booklet. Students worked through one page per class, and you collected the booklets at the end to check. The whole routine — preparing, printing, collecting — took maybe twelve minutes each session. The payoff showed up after three weeks: the irregular participles stopped being mysterious, and the future subjunctive started appearing correctly in sentences where it actually mattered. There is a nuance most beginners miss. When you design these games, do not group verbs by conjugation class. Put them mixed together. When students see all the -AR verbs clustered in one block, they start looking for patterns that only apply within that group, and they miss the cross-class irregularities that show up in real usage. A mixed layout forces them to actually read each verb, which is the whole point. I learned this the hard way when a student told me she could conjugate cantar perfectly but still wrote eles vajem instead of eles vazem. She had never seen vagar and vir in the same drill, so her brain was applying the wrong rule by default.
Another common pitfall: printing too many verbs per page. I started with thirty on a single sheet, thinking more repetition was better. It was not. By verb number twenty-two, students were skimming instead of conjugating, and the error rate on irregular forms actually went up. Thirteen to fifteen verbs per page is the sweet spot for double-sided printing on standard A4. You get about forty-five seconds per verb before fatigue sets in, which is enough for accurate recall without the mental wandering that comes from a wall of text.
How to set one up without wasting time
Start with the verb list. Most Brazilian textbooks cover around one hundred and twenty common verbs across the major tenses. Pick the twenty to thirty that appear most frequently in your curriculum and that your students struggle with. Do not include every irregular verb in the language. Focus on the ones that keep showing up in exercises and in real comprehension tasks. If a verb appears in fewer than five textbook exercises per chapter, it probably does not belong in your first batch. Choose your tense focus. Mixing tenses in a single game usually slows things down because students spend more time switching mental frameworks than actually conjugating. Pick one tense per session — preterite, imperfect, future subjunctive, that sort of thing — and build the game around it. You can rotate tenses across sessions, but keep them separate within a single document. I track which tenses each student handles well and which ones they revert to guessing, and I adjust the frequency accordingly. The data is rough but useful: after six months of this, about sixty percent of my students stop making the same irregular errors in their target tense.
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Layout matters more than you might think. Use a monospaced font like Courier or Consolas for the verb tables. It makes alignment cleaner, especially when you are printing double-sided and the columns need to line up perfectly on the back. Font size twelve for the verb stems, fourteen for the subject pronouns. Anything smaller and students start squinting, which slows everything down. I tested this with two different font sizes on a class of thirty-five, and the larger pronouns reduced misreads by about a third during timed drills. Testing takes about twenty minutes per game. Print one copy, run through it yourself, time yourself, and note where you hesitate. If you hesitate on three or more entries, something is wrong with the selection or the layout. Rewrite or reformat before you make thirty copies. I lost an entire afternoon once printing games with a typo in the eu form of dar — I wrote doi instead of dê in the preterite. Kids caught it immediately and refused to trust any of the answers on the page. Fixing that one error took five minutes, but rebuilding their confidence in the material took an entire class period.
Where this approach breaks down
These games do not teach spelling rules. They do not explain porquê versus porque versus por quê. They are purely mechanical: recognize the stem, apply the pattern, produce the form. If a student still confuses those particles after three months of verb drills, the game is not the problem. The problem is that spelling instruction was never part of the routine. Pair these games with a separate dictation session, or use them alongside the kind of grammar explanations that actually address orthographic choices. They work best when they are one piece of a broader system, not the whole system. They also do not work for advanced learners who already have automatic conjugation. If a student can conjugate the entire present indicative without thinking, giving them another drill in the same tense is just busywork. I use a quick diagnostic at the start of each term: I write five sentences with blanks, ask the student to fill them in orally, and time the response. If they get four out of five correct in under ten seconds per item, they move to the next difficulty tier instead of repeating the same material. About twenty percent of my incoming students qualify for that tier on day one, and skipping the basics for them saves everyone time.
There is a limit to how many tenses these games can cover before they lose usefulness. Beyond four or five tenses per booklet, students start conflating forms, especially between the imperfect and the preterite, or between the present subjunctive and the future subjunctive. I cap my booklets at five tenses and make separate sets for the rest. It means more printing and more storage, but the error rate stays manageable. When I tried cramming eight tenses into one document, the confusion rate doubled within two weeks, and we had to stop using it altogether.
Alternatives worth considering
If printing is not an option, the same format works on screen. A simple spreadsheet with locked cells where students type conjugations and get immediate color-coded feedback does roughly the same thing. The downside is that screen-based practice tends to be faster and less deliberate, which means students sometimes skip steps in their mental process. Paper forces a slower pace that matches the kind of recall you want for real-time conversation. I have used both and prefer paper for beginner and intermediate levels, digital for review sessions with students who already have solid foundations. Another option is oral-only drills without any writing. I have done this with small groups, calling out subject pronouns and having students respond with conjugations in sequence. It takes longer to set up and does not produce a physical artifact, but it builds fluency in a way that reading from a page sometimes does not. The trade-off is accountability: with paper, you can collect and check work. With oral drills, you rely on observation and memory. I combine both — paper for practice and assessment, oral for review and speed building — and that combination seems to hold results longer than either approach alone.
One more thing. These games are not a replacement for reading and listening practice. They build mechanical accuracy, which matters, but accuracy without exposure to real Portuguese is like knowing the parts of an engine without ever starting the car. My students who also read graded readers and listen to slow Portuguese podcasts consistently outperform those who only do the drills, even when the drill-only group spends twice as much time on the games. Use the printed materials as a foundation, not as the entire structure. The best results I have seen come from a routine that combines four elements: weekly verb games, biweekly spelling notes, daily short reading passages, and monthly oral review sessions. No single element carries the weight. The verb games keep the forms accessible, the spelling notes address the orthographic confusions, the reading provides context, and the oral review builds speed. Four elements, each doing one job, none trying to do everything. That is the setup I recommend, and it is the one that has stuck across multiple years and multiple classroom configurations.
