It is for this reason that every teacher needs a collection of easy to prepare time-filling activities ready to go at any time.
Letter string dictation
This is a great way to lead into the topic that you want to cover in the class and also serves as a simple activity to help students recognize letters of the alphabet. Think of a couple of questions for students to discuss in pairs or groups. Write the questions down and then dictate them as a long string of letters. For example whatsyourfavouritecolour? whatdidyoudoattheweekend? whatkindofbooksdoyouliketoread?
After dictating the letter strings, students should attempt to form the questions and then discuss and report back to class.
For more advanced students try dictating the letters backward and then have the students decode the question. This is more challenging because students will find it more difficult to predict the next letter and therefore must focus on the letters being dictated. For example: ?teemotekiltsomuoydluowohw
Hangman
This popular filler can also be a great way to start a lesson with beginner learners who are still unsure of the alphabet. Just put a recently learned word on the board and let the students take it in turns to guess a letter.
Word ladders
In this activity, a word must be transformed step by step into a target word. To illustrate the idea, write the word run on the board and explain that the target word is fit. For each turn, only one letter can be changed. See if the class can find a valid sequence together. Some possible sequences are:
| run fun fin fit | cat cot cog dog | head bead beat boat boot foot | gives lives likes lakes takes |
Students will need access to a dictionary in order to check if their words are valid. Put students in pairs and have them create their own word ladders to test their classmates with.
Odd one out
Give the students a couple of examples to guess, then get students to come up with their own ideas. Here are some examples: apple, peach, banana, tomato – a banana doesn’t have seeds strawberry, branch, bowling ball, boat, iceberg – bowling balls don’t float window, river, envelope, client, oregano – client doesn’t begin and end with the same letter comb, champagne, knife, plum – the word plum doesn’t contain any silent letters Note: There can be more than one correct answer.
Name ten
Have students think of 10 items that fit particular criteria. For example:
- Jobs where you have to wear a uniform
- English football clubs
- Sports that are played with a ball
- Foods that contain egg
- Animals that lay eggs
- Three letter parts of the body – eye, arm, leg, hip, ear, toe jaw, rib, lip, gum
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Word Association
This must be one of the oldest ESL warm-up activities, but sometimes the simplest ideas turn out to be surprisingly effective and word games don’t get any simpler than word association. Give an initial word, for example, banana and each student takes it in turns to say a word which they associate with the previous word. If the connection isn’t obvious, challenge the student to justify their choice. banana – monkey – zoo – tourists – hotel – bible …
Spontaneous Scatter Sheet
Scatter Sheets are a great way to review vocabulary, introduce a theme, and get students talking. As a warmer, have students brainstorm words connected to a theme, for example, the seaside, London, marketing, etc. Write these words on the board randomly, not in straight lines or columns but higgledy-piggledy and at jaunty angles. When you have around 20 words on the board, go around the room asking each student, in turn, to describe one of the words, when it’s been successfully guessed, circle it and move on to the next student. Encourage students to let the describer produce at least two sentences before shouting out the answer.
Whose weekend?
Give each student a slip of paper and ask each student to write down three things they did at the weekend. Collect up the slips of paper and randomly read each one out. The students must guess whose weekend is being described.
Compound word quiz
This is a fun little quiz you can do at the beginning of a lesson to get your learner’s brains buzzing. Choose five groups of three compound words with the same stem and write them on the board without their stem. For example paste, ache, brush (the stem is tooth) or ball, man, board (the stem is snow). Put them on the board (as below) and give students five to ten minutes to figure out what the missing stem is.
________paste
________ ache
________brush
Here are some more examples:
doorbell, doorman, doorstep | headline, headcount, headlight, headset, headhunter | backpack, backseat, backfire | timeline, timetable, timesaver | blackbird, blacklist, blackout | lighthouse, lightbulb, lightweight | daydream, daylight, daytime | nightlife, nightclub, nighttime, nightmare | sunburn, sunset, sunshine, sunrise | waterfall, waterbed, waterproof, waterfront, watercolor | lifeboat, lifetime, lifeguard | paperback, paperwork, paperweight, paperboy/girl
One-upmanship
Start the activity off by explaining the concept of one-upmanship, that some people always like to appear to be more interesting or superior to others in their company. Tell the students a relatively mundane story about something that happened recently and invite a student to tell a similar story but to top it in some way. Each student, in turn, tries to top the previous student’s tale. For example You: Yesterday I overslept and was five minutes late to class. Student: That’s nothing, I overslept and was an hour late. Student B: An hour! I once overslept a whole day! I
I hope that you like these ideas and find them useful for your English classes.
Good luck and good teaching.
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