Imperfect and Perfect Tenses

For the last several years, I've been using a translation technique to teach the imperfect and perfect tenses. Because they have implications that exist but are rarely actively noticed in English, I have found that calling attention to them in English first tends to result in them sticking more closely in the kids' understanding. Furthermore, by the end of it, the story is entirely in the target language, so the students have a thorough understanding of the story because they've heard it in English several times, but they are eventually only processing it in Latin.

I wrote out a short text in Latin like this:

Ursa in silva habitabat. Ego in silva ambulabam. Cervos et plantas spectavi.
A bear was living in the woods. I was walking in the woods. I saw deer and plants. Suddenly a bear appeared.

Subito, ursa apparuit. Ursa, "ROAR!" dixit. Ego clamavi. 
Suddenly a bear appeared. The bear said, "ROAR!" I screamed.

Per silvam currebam. Subito, arbor cecidit et ursam pulsavit. Ursam derisi.

I was running through the woods. Suddenly, a tree fell and hit the bear. I laughed at the bear.

Ursa perivit. Domum redivi.

The bear died. I went back home.

I read the whole story to them in English, signing as I went. (It doesn’t matter if you know sign language; the goal is just to have a recognizable hand sign to go with each concept. It's for kinesthetic memory and for visual cuing.) Then, I started back over, still signing. Read the first sentence in L2 and the rest in L1. I was doing this with verbs, so every time I said a verb, I made them clap to stop me and we identified its tense. Now read sentence one and two in L2 and the rest in L1. Because they’ve heard the first line already, read it along with them, but stop strategically, doing the hand-sign for the word that goes there. Some of the kids will chime in. As you do more repetitions, stop more and more frequently until the kids are essentially telling you the story, periodically spot-checking if necessary (asking them what a particular word means, etc).

The reason I wrote it out in sections is that I didn't read the entire (English) story every time. I did the first and second times, but after that, I read it (in English) probably four lines at a time, adding another couple lines as I got near where the end of my current section was. I did this, frankly, because otherwise I think they would have perished of boredom from hearing the same thing repeatedly (the brain craves NOVELTY! -Carol Gaab), and also they really didn't need reinforcement/repetition of English; they needed it in the target language.

Much like in a micrologue, the intense repetition (and eventual requirement that they chant along, unlike a micrologue) of the language meant that it began to sear what I wanted them to internalize into their minds. They are MUCH more consistently processing, understanding, recognizing and, in some cases, even using the imperfect and perfect than they were when I tried to flat-out teach them the differences a couple years ago.

We did actually follow this up with a Rassias-style micrologue the next day, and almost to a kid, they got everything down because they'd heard the story and knew it so well that it was just a matter of writing it down.