Esl warmer games

When the time is up, their partner talks about himself or herself. After these two minutes, switch up the pairs and start over. Continue swapping partners each round until everyone has talked with every classmate. If you are teaching English online and cannot split students into pairs, simply give them each one minute to address the whole class.

As mentioned before, teenagers and adults have an equal need for a fun warm-up activity as young learners. Here are some slightly more complex warm-ups that will engage your older students and prepare them for the lesson. Take a look at these tips when using games to teach English to adults online. For this activity, you can divide the students into small groups or pairs or they can work on their own.

The first group or individual student to unscramble the words and read the sentence aloud correctly wins that round. When creating the sentences, you can use motivating mottos, the target language of the day, or review a grammar point from a previous lesson. This is a great ESL warm-up activity for encouraging teamwork and practicing vocabulary and grammar.

It can be used in the online classroom as long as you have a whiteboard behind you that is visible to the students. Ask each student to give you one word they know. This can be a noun, an adjective, a preposition, anything they want to include in the story.

Collect the words by writing them on the whiteboard. When you have all the words from your students written on the board, let them collaborate to tell a story with them. Check off the words as the class tells the story, and make sure everyone gets a chance to contribute! Read more about the power of storytelling in the ESL classroom. This activity revolves around improving fluency and asking questions. Students will have a chance to learn about each other and to use English freely.

Write a topic on the board or tell your students the topic of the day. They can ask as many questions as they can within one minute, and then their partner has one minute to ask them questions. After the time is up, put students into new pairs and repeat as time allows. Teacher Jhonny teaching an online class to his adult student. For this warm-up activity for English teaching, show students a map of a town, and choose a starting point and a destination on the map.

Then, in either pairs or as a whole class, have students provide the directions to the destination to guide you through the map. You can use this primarily as a speaking activity or even get in extra writing practice by having students write the directions down. Alternatively, write a question on the board but this time scramble the letters of each word. For example: tahw si ruyo seealirt rommey? 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 recognise 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?

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 backwards 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:? For more ideas on using dictation see the article 10 dictation activities. 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. 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:. Students will need access to a dictionary in order to check if their words are valid.

If you want to find possible word pairs, there is a site with a handy word ladder generator. Put students in pairs and have them create their own word ladders to test their classmates with.

Give students a theme, for example, jobs, things you take on holiday, food. Write the letters A to Z on the board. Teams of students must race to write an appropriate word next to each letter on the board. Read more about the A to Z game here.

Find a group of compound words or collocations which share a common word. For example, bedroom, bathroom, living room, classroom, showroom , etc. Here are some more examples:. Set a five-minute time limit and in groups have students think up and write down as many facts as they can about bananas or cats, Belgium, David Beckham, etc. One point should be given for each true sentence. One of many brilliantly simple ideas from one of my favourite teaching books.

Ask students to come up with a list of as many unconventional uses for it as they can. For example paperweight, weapon, pen holder, smartphone dock. The longest list wins the potato. Students sit in silence for two minutes and write down every sound that they hear. Let them compare their lists with their neighbours before seeing who has the longest list? If you like this activity try doing a guess the sound quiz. Give the students a couple of examples to guess, then get students to come up with their own ideas.

An ESL classroom staple. Write or dictate three sentences about yourself. Two statements should be true and one false, for example: I used to be an air steward I can ride a unicycle My favourite food is sushi Now invite students to discuss in pairs which statement they think is the lie. Ask each pair which statement they think is untrue and have them explain why. Reveal your answer, and ask students to come up with three sentences about themselves.

I find students need quite a lot of time at least five minutes to come up with three ideas. If some students are still short of a sentence or two, start the game anyway, and they can finish their statements during play.

In each case, the other students have to guess which is the untrue statement. See this page for more ideas on using dishonesty for fun and profit. Say a word from a list of homophones and challenge students to write both or more forms of the word. Possible words include: bear,bare,piece,peace,not,knot,here,hear,witch,which,flower,flour,would,wood,be,bee,heal,heel,soul,sole,air,heir,break,brake,mist,missed,read,red,board,bored,buy,bye,pair,pear,male,mail,jeans,genes,not,knot,where,wear , so,sew,sow.

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. Think of a four-letter word and write XXXX on the board, each X represents one of the letters of your word.

Invite the first student to guess what the word is. Start a new line underneath your original XXXX. In the following example, the teacher chooses the word FIRE. Stick to 4 or 5 letter words. When students are familiar with the game you can get them to come and put their own words on the board. This is a guess the rule type game. Think of a rule which governs which items can be taken on a picnic, for example, it must be six letters long, or it must start with a vowel.

This is also a terrific way to practice measure expressions, e. A singer friend from the Royal Opera House in London recommended that every day should begin with the students standing up, stretching reaching for the ceiling, turn left and right, touch your toes and taking a sequence of three slow, deep breaths.

Oxygenating the brain, shaking off morning lethargy and performing a simple act all together seems a great way to begin! If you enjoyed this article, please help spread it by clicking one of those sharing buttons below. And if you are interested in more, you should follow our Facebook page where we share more about creative, non-boring ways to teach English.

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