and points are given for each correct answer. It’s also possible to recycle things like grammatical structures from previous lessons as well. #3: A to Z Alphabet Game. Start a new line underneath your original XXXX. I often use this when I work in-company. Have students arrange themselves in order according to a given criterion. ESL warm-up activities are essential in the English classroom. Use longish seed words such as apologise, dictionary or September. If you want to find possible word pairs, there is a site with a  handy word ladder generator. For example: tahw si ruyo seealirt rommey? Give the students a couple of examples to guess, then get students to come up with their own ideas. This means that things like dictation have fallen out of favour a little bit. Find out more details right here: Odd One Out ESL Vocabulary Review. Let them compare their lists with their neighbours before seeing who has the longest list? In twos or threes, students make as many new words from it as they can. Student B: An hour! They are a versatile, 4-skills ESL activity that gets students up and out of their seats talking to everyone. Find a group of compound words or collocations which share a common word. Do you want to find out how to make your own surveys? For example: most item you have the ever expensive what’s bought? You can find out more about it here: Concentration ESL Vocabulary Activity. If the connection isn’t obvious, challenge the student to justify their choice. Hopefully the students will have different ones and this will give them something interesting to talk about! For example paperweight, weapon, pen holder, smartphone dock. With a good warmer you can put your students into English mode; attentive,  interested and ready to participate. Odd One Out. It’s slightly complicated to grasp but fun when you get the hang of it. A quick warm-up activity that you can do for the shopping unit is this A-Z alphabet game. It’s easy enough, but question forms can be a little bit tricky. Spin the marker again when you feel the conversation has run its course. For more ideas on using dictation see the article 10 dictation activities. Then, in pairs or threes, students have to try to think of some category of things that you might shop for, one for each letter. Ah, the ESL shopping unit. The be verb in the present simple is often the first grammar that students learn when they’re learning English. Take a look on YouTube or English Central for all the good stuff. This is a guess the rule type game. Writing stops when the first team yells finished! In this activity, a word must be transformed step by step into a target word. This popular filler can also be a great way to start a lesson with beginner learners who are still unsure of the alphabet. I think it will make the lesson more comfortable and fum!! You could make a list of arguments for and against the thesis. If some students are still short of a sentence or two, start the game anyway, and they can finish their statements during play. We’d love to hear from you. For example by age, alphabetical order of first name or surname, the number of shoes owned, etc. A quick vocabulary activity that lends itself well to shopping is this word association one. Students sit in silence for two minutes and write down every sound that they hear. Your email address will not be published. Great! One of many brilliantly simple ideas from one of my favourite teaching books. Teacher: No, you can’t take eggs. There’s an orange shirt as well as a blue one. Ask the students to think of a room or area which they are all quite familiar with and then have them guide you as you try to draw a plan of the room on the board. Write the questions down and then dictate them as a long string of letters. all three of our PDF eBooks for under a fiver, The Categories Game – for reviewing vocabulary and a handy time filler. This is great for practising there is and there are as well as prepositions of place and furnishing vocabulary. So I will feel ready to tell or relate after trying few. For example, if we have been studying animal habitats, might ask, “Where do emus/ penguins live? For example: Find out more details right here: Odd One Out ESL Vocabulary Review. Give each student a slip of paper and ask each student to write down three things they did at the weekend. I have done a very interesting activity in class. Score teams a point per word and award a bonus point for the longest. XXXX XXXX – COAT X/XX – BEST X✓X✓ – HIKE /✓X✓ – RIDE ✓✓✓✓ – FIRE A word of warning. Did you try out an activity from this list, or do you have another one that you’d like to recommend to us? I LOVE to use surveys with my students! Based on the code-breaking board game where players have to deduce the order of 4 coloured pegs which the other player had hidden behind a plastic guard. Find out more about this: A challenging activity for more advanced learners is dictogloss. Give the students a couple of examples to guess, then get students to come up with their own ideas. In twos or threes, students attempt to come up with the longest word that begins with each letter. Thank you so much – used some of these games in my TD Seminar for fellow teachers today, and they all loved them! Based on the BBC Radio show. Have students report back to the class. etc. The way it works is that students write down the alphabet on a piece of paper. For example: If you want to see some of the best recommendations for how to teach this important concept in English grammar, you’ll want to check this out: If you want to teach your students about singular or plural nouns, clothes and shopping makes a nice topic choices. A variant on this I call devil’s tic tac toe: The person whose turn it is may replace one of the opponent’s marks with her or his (assuming that the player has earned the right to put a marker on by correctly answering my questions). love, information, air ). Student A: Fortunately, it was insured. Student C: Fortunately, my grandfather said he would buy me a new car. If that’s not some ESL teaching gold then I’m not sure what is. PE Warm up Games. Another warmer I use is ‘What’s in the box?’.