Students love to have things to manipulate.  These cards, which are easy to print out, give them a sense of time.  They also don’t have to be soldiers; you could show the times/tenses by using buildings, or people in various costumes, etc.  Change these to your heart’s content!  Students can also trade them back and forth; some of my students decorated their notebooks with these.  The visual aspect, and the ability to use them when looking at a Latin sentence, is very helpful.  While they are all in the third person, and only active indicative, the tense markers are easy to identify. 

By Ruth Breindel, who taught Latin, Greek, Linguistics and Mythology at Moses Brown School for 30 years.