7 awesome zero preparation activities to fill in those spare moments during your class.

How many times have you wanted a quick easy activity to start your class  or you have finished your class early, you have 5 minutes left and there is nothing for your students to do? For times like these, teachers always need a selection of zero preparation activities which they can utilize to fill in those occasionally encountered moments.

Here are seven that you might find very useful.

1. On the weekend

We know that listening is the most important yet often neglected skill for language learning. It's also something some pupils find hard to do. To develop listening skill and provide structured comprehensible input try this activity:

Tell the class that you are going to tell them what you did last weekend and that they have to take notes in English. The amount of detail you go into and the speed that you go will depend upon your students and their level. Talk for about three minutes.

Next, make up some true or false statements about what you said in your account. Students must put their hands up to give the answers (True or False). This can also be further extended by getting students in pairs to recount your weekend from their notes and/or their own weekend.

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2. Just for a minute

Pupils work in small groups. Individuals try to talk for a minute without hesitating, stopping, repeating or changing the subject. This works well with intermediate and advanced level students. You can give easy topics to intermediates and harder ones to advanced level students and can be great preparation for any oral exam or interview. It is best to begin by presenting an improvised example of your own to demonstrate your expectations.
The subjects that you choose can be either a revisión of previous lessons learned, or, in the case of advanced level students, an unknown subject to test their abilities to think and produce in English.

This is an activity which can definitely encourage students to speak fearlessly with an emphasis on fluency rather than accuracy.

3. Would I lie to you?

For intermediate to advanced level. Students try to work out which three of six statements are not true by asking you questions. You prepare five statements about yourself, three true and two false, and write them on the board. For example:

• My uncle is taller than me.
• I have a red bicycle.
• I was an engineer and I created great things.
• My Father was raised in Peru.
• My favorite movie is The Proposal.
• My father loves to listen to ACDC.

You can ask the class how many of the statements they think are true or false. Then tell them that there are three false statements. Tell them that they have to work out which by asking you questions, listening to your answers and watching your reaction. You can embroider your answers as much as possible, giving the right number of hints depending on how fast you think your class is.

Let the students ask questions until they have decided which ones they believe to be true (by a show of hands). Give them the real answer. You could add an element of competition by putting the class into pairs or small groups, with each group coming up with their chosen two false statements.

An extension to this task is to ask students to write down similar statements for themselves – three true and three false. Divide them into groups and repeat as above with one person from the group being questioned by the others.

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4. Snapshot

This is an extremely simple, zero preparation and fun idea for creating conversation lessons with high intermediate or advanced level classes. You take a simple picture featuring a couple of people and use it as the basis for some imaginative storytelling.

What is her / his name?
Where are they? What country? What town?
What is their relationship?
How long have they known each other?
Are they work together?
How old are they?
What are they about to do?
What are they talking about?
What is she like as a person? What is he like?
What are their interests?
Why do they look so happy?
How did they meet?
Whered did they meet?
What were they doing before they met today?
What are they going to do next?
What do they do for a living?
What do they think of their jobs?
Have they always done that?
What did they used to do?

Now, how the conversation develops depends on just how imaginative your students are. You would do well to tell the students at the start to be as creative as possible. They may take you the story some interesting directions or you may need to prompt them to use their imaginations a bit more by suggesting some more outrageous ideas, e.g. he has twelve children, she is a adventure book writer, he is an ex-criminal, they are having a baby together etc.

It is probably best to do this as a teacher-led task, but with some classes, you could hand out a list of suggested questions and get the students to work in pairs or small groups. This would lead to a variety of different stories which can be compared later on.

For this activity, it's easy to encourage the use of different time frames - past, present and future - and to go on from speaking to writing or more listening. For example, you could make up your own base story about the couple, describe it to the class whilst they take notes. The students then finish the activity by giving their account of what they heard to a partner or the whole class.

How about getting them to write an imagined dialogue between the couple, once their story is established? Or how about getting the students to find their own picture and build an imaginative story around it, either spoken, written or both.

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5. Build a silly story

This activity starts with the teacher writing the opening sentence of a story on pieces of paper. Have one piece of paper for each group. (E.g.“Today when I was driving to school, …..).Give students, either as a class, or in groups, one of the pieces of paper with the starting sentence for the story. Next, they must build silly stories one word at a time, by moving around the class student by student. Sentences need to be grammatically correct so that the task develops both meaning, syntactic and morphological skills. Tell students that they can say "full stop"  if the sentence comes to a natural end.

6. Word chain

This is a fun and simple activity for warming up your students and works with most levels.

If they are a sharp group then you could try it without having them pass the ball back to you. After they say their word you could have them pass it to another student and so on.

Instructions:

1.    Get a ball or a soft die

2.    Have your students stand in a line in front of you.

3.    Pass the ball to a student and give them a letter ("T")

4.    That student gives you a word that begins with that letter ("Time")

5.    They pass the ball back to you

6.    Pass the ball to the next student

7.    Take the last letter from that word ("e")

8.    Pass the ball and give the next student that letter

9.    Continue

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7. Teacher says.

"Teacher Says" is a fun activity for warming up children that works well with young children from about kindergarten to 3rd or 4th grade.

Instructions:

Prepare a mental list of very basic commands like:

·         Touch your toes

·         Touch your ears, or nose, or eyes, or hair, or chin, etc.

·         Sit down

·         Jump

·         Wave "hi"

·         etc.

How to do it:

1.    Have your students stand up

2.    Say "Teacher says _____ (command)" or "_____ (command)"

3.    If you say "Teacher says" then they do it

4.    If you don't say "Teacher says" then they don't do it

5.    If they do it successfully, then make them sit down

6.    Continue until everyone is sitting.

Another variation on this activity is that instead of saying "teacher says" you could just say "touch your nose" and then try to trick them by doing something different from what you are saying (actually touching your leg instead).

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