Potato’s Helping Verbs: A Fun Way to Teach Helping Verbs
Helping verbs (also called auxiliary verbs) can feel like a dry grammar list—kids memorize is, are, was, were… without really understanding how they work. But what if we gave those little helpers a story?
Enter Potato the Frog 🐸—our classroom sidekick—ready to show how helping verbs can change the meaning of the same action with just one little word.
🐸 Meet Potato the Frog
Potato isn’t just any frog—he’s a soft, adorable, and easy to catch plush we use in class:
- For our hot potato game 🎶
- To model prepositions (Potato on the box, Potato under the chair…)
- To act out silly grammar examples
If you’d like a Potato of your own, you can grab the same frog we use here on Amazon. 🐸✨
🧠 What Are Helping Verbs?
Verbs are the engines of sentences—they show what someone does or is. But sometimes, a verb needs a little sidekick. That’s where helping verbs—sometimes called auxiliary verbs—come in!
Helping verbs team up with a main verb to tell us when, how, or if something happens.
Think of them as tiny clue words:
- When is the action happening?
- How is it happening?
- Is it certain, possible, or just imagined?
🪰 Potato’s Helping Verbs
Use Potato’s Helping Verbs activity to illustrate how helping verbs change the meaning of the same fun sentence… “Potato eats a fly”.
Each time, just swap in a helping verb and point to the fly (either a doodle on the board or the one on our activity sheet) as you say “eat a fly.” This keeps the action steady, avoids tricky verb endings, and lets the helping verbs shine.
- Potato will … eat a fly (future — it’s going to happen)
- Potato is … eating a fly (present — happening now)
- Potato was … eating a fly (past — happening then)
- Potato has … eaten a fly (already happened)
- Potato had … eaten a fly (happened earlier)
- Potato can … eat a fly (ability)
- Potato could … eat a fly (possibility)
- Potato may … eat a fly (permission/possibility)
- Potato might … eat a fly (less certain possibility)
- Potato must … eat a fly (necessity)
- Potato would … eat a fly (conditional — depends on something else)
Bonus: Kids love watching Potato “chase” the fly each time you read the sentence! 🐸✨
🍎 Teacher Tip: Try It Two Ways
If you model this on the board, draw a quick doodle of a fly 🪰 at the end of the sentence:
Potato ____ … 🪰
Then fill in a new helping verb each time. Read it aloud as you point:
“Potato will… (points to fly) eat a fly.”
This visual trick keeps the focus on how the helper changes the meaning—without fussing over verb endings or sentence rewrites.
👉 Prefer a printable? Download our Potato’s Helping Verbs activity sheet! It includes a word bank of helping verbs next to each fill-in-the-blank sentence.
✅ Why This Works
- One sentence, many helpers. Kids instantly see how meaning shifts—no memorization required.
- Silly context. Potato chasing a fly is fun, unexpected, and memorable.
- Built-in repetition. Reusing the same core structure helps the helper verbs stand out.
📥 Free Download
Want a grab-and-go version for your classroom or homeschool?
Download our printable Potato’s Helping Verbs—a one-page fill-in-the-blank style activity sheet. Great for grammar notebooks or a quick warm-up!
🐸 Final Thought
Helping verbs don’t have to be boring. With Potato the Frog, grammar becomes a little sillier, a little stickier—and a lot more fun.
✨ Would you like to see more posts like this? Drop a comment or send us a note. We’ve got plenty of grammar games and activities up our sleeve!
