Active and passive voice
Use the passive voice to shift focus from the agent to the action or recipient, understanding how passive constructions affect the presentation of information in formal and objective writing
Share and support
Teaching Table
Set out your lesson
Change suitable active sentences into passive sentences without changing the event or tense. Explain which person or thing the sentence puts first and why.
Use 'The helper opens the gate' and 'The helpers open the gate.' Ask what changes with one helper or more than one. Then compare opens and opened. Expected: opens agrees with singular helper; opened places the action in the past. Ask who acts and what receives the action. If those roles are unclear, label helper / opens / gate and repeat with 'The dog pushed the ball.' An available lesson does not show that the learner is ready.
Check readiness directly. Prerequisite availability is not attainment.
Use paper and a pencil. All source text and task facts are supplied. Start with the readiness check, then Show, Guided and Try. There is no speed or word-count target. Read the active sheet on screen and write on plain paper. No printer, cutting, purchase or internet is needed. The adult may read instructions or source text without supplying corrections or interpretations. Record read-aloud help, prompts, spelling help and scribing. Oral explanations can show reasoning; dictation and adult scribing do not show independent written composition or handwriting. Pause or split the lesson as needed. Adult-only: keep scripts and keys away from learner pages. Share only the current Show model. Put Show and Guided work aside before Try. Keep the fresh task facts and passages available; this is not a memory test. Give no target correction, classification, phrase or interpretation during the first attempt. If help is needed, give it and record the work as supported. Use only the supplied fictional situations. No real names, personal stories, online contact, uploads, public sharing or physical experiments are needed.
Record the actual response and assistance. These tasks do not establish mastery.
Use the complete materials on screen or print only the current sheet. Keep adult guidance out of learner view. Retain an earlier model only when the current step supplies it as context.
Teaching limits and safe use
These are finite task opportunities, not proof of mastery. Record what was attempted and what support was used.
All report extracts are invented language examples, not claims about real experiments. Passive voice is not inherently objective. This lesson does not teach passives in every tense or transformations of intransitive verbs.
Record the actual response and assistance. These tasks do not establish mastery.
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Teaching approaches
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1 approach
Change suitable active sentences into passive sentences without changing the event or tense. Explain which person or thing the sentence puts first and why.
Change suitable active sentences into passive sentences without changing the event or tense. Explain which person or thing the sentence puts first and why.
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Learning resources
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Check understanding
- Convert active sentences to passive voice and explain the change in emphasis
- Identify passive constructions in news reports and scientific writing
- Choose between active and passive voice based on purpose and audience
“When your child wants to write about something without saying who did it — like in a science report — can they switch the sentence round to say "The experiment was carried out" instead of "We carried out the experiment"?”
Curriculum record
- Type
- Procedural
- Subject
- English
- Domain
- Grammar & Punctuation
- Age range
- Ages 10–11
Standards