Warm-Up Activities and Games
Games and warm up activities are essential for language classes. Games can
put students into English mode. Personally, I used to love the lesson when my
teachers integrated games into lessons when I was a student. That’s why, I’m
trying to find more games to engage students and make them ready to
participate.
Here is a list of games that don’t require much preparation.
Careful! Noise can come up L
1.
Wind The Rope
This is a speaking game. Cut the rope in different lengts. Put them in a
box or a bag. Each student will choose a rope blindfolded. S/he needs to wind the
rope in her/his forefinger while s/he is speaking. The student need to talk
until the rope ends.
This is really a fun activity that I did
in the beginning of the semester. I used it as a introduction game. Studnets
came in front of the class and talked about their interest in order to
introduce themselves. The ones who draw the shortest ones were lucky J
2.
Chaos Game
You need a long ball of rope. Students form a circle. You can decide on a
theme beforehand -for example, the problems you have in the classtoom-. The
teacher starts the game with throwing the rope-ball to someone (holding the tip
of the rope) and states a problem. The one who gets the ball does the same
thing. In this way, problems consist a chaos. Since the problems are connected,
it needs to be solved. In order to solve the problems, students give adices
backwards. The game continues until the ball is wrapped again.
3.
Pictionary:
The goal of the game is for one person
to draw a picture without using any letters, numbers, words, gestures, verbal
cues or nonverbal cues, and the others have to guess what word corresponds to
the picture being drawn. It can be played with groups or as a whole-class.
4.
Describe the Picture
This game can be used in any topic but I
played this as follows: I opened a room picture which has many objects on the
smartboard. The students looked at the picture 15-20 seconds. Then closed the
page. I wanted students to write down as many objects as they can remember. The
one who wrote the highest number of objects won the race. This is a fun
activity for begginers to learn concrete objects.
5.
Mixed-up Sentence
This
activity can be used as warm up. Write a sentence on the board but mix up the
word order, then challenge students to reconstruct the original sentence. This warmer can also serve to review language from a previous
lesson or prime the class for a new topic.
6.
Quick Questions
Write a list of two
or three questions on the board which introduce the theme of the lesson. For
example, if you are going to talk about books, you could write:
What’s your
favourite movie?
Who was the leading
character?
What type of movie is
it ? etc.
Give the students
5-10 minutes to discuss the questions and then have students report back to the
class.
7.
Make the longest words
8. Hangman
Your student have already known this game. They will tell you J
9. What’s
the missing word?
Find a group of compound words or collocations
which share a common word. For example, bedroom, bathroom, living
room, classroom, showroom, etc. Give students one of the word/collocation
parts, such as bed and have them guess the missing part, add
to the list writing bath, living, class, etc., until they
successfully guess the word. Here are some more examples:
· ear, boxing, diamond,
finger, wedding (ring)
· tea, soup, table,
dessert (spoon)
· kitchen, tea, bath,
beach (towel)
· green, light, ware,
boat, work, wife (house)
10. 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
11. Two truths and a lie
Write or three sentences about yourself. Two
statements should be true and one false, for example: I used to have
blond hair, I can ride a horse, My favourite food is fries. 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.
12. 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 …
13. Three things
in common
This is a great icebreaker, but you can also
use it as a lead-in to a theme or to test your students’ knowledge of a grammar
point. Simply ask students to work in pairs and find three things that they
have in common and then report back to the class. You can narrow the topic down
to areas like three things we both did at the weekend, three foods we both
like, three things we both don’t like about this city, three things neither of
us has done yet but would like to, etc.
14. 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.
15. A-Z Game
Write the
letters A to Z in columns down
the board. Divide the class into two teams. Get each team to nominate a writer
who comes to the front and stands at the board. Each writer will need a
different coloured board pen or piece of chalk. As soon as you say start,
students must race to write an appropriate word next to each letter. For
example, if the theme is adjectives
then they might write. Angry, Beautiful,
etc. Teammates help by shouting out suggestions and giving spelling tips. After
a five or ten minute limit, give a point for every word each team has written,
and congratulate the winners.
16. Draw the Picture
In this activity members split up into pairs or small groups. One person looks at a scene from a magazine or book. The other person has a pencil and a blank piece of paper. The person with the picture will try to describe everything he sees to the drawer. This is good practice for using prepositions of place.
In this activity members split up into pairs or small groups. One person looks at a scene from a magazine or book. The other person has a pencil and a blank piece of paper. The person with the picture will try to describe everything he sees to the drawer. This is good practice for using prepositions of place.
This
is a gamet hat I play at the end of units. Put a bell on the table and choose
two students. I ask choose important vocabularies to students. The quicker
student has the chance of answering. Students like this game a lot.
18. Name Poem
It
can be a good idea to start the lesson with a poem. Students can write a poem
with their names. If the class level is low, it can be shortened to a Word. For
example, you can ask students to write adjectives with their names: “Nice Elegant Smart Lovely Impressive.”
19. Number X is here, where is
number Y?
This
is a game that I learned from students. Each student are given a number in
order. Let’s say you have 30 students in the classroom. Write the numbers on
the board from 1-30. One student (let’s say number 12) start with saying “
Number 12 is here where is Number 23”. Number 23 needs to aswer in 2 seconds.
If s/he cannot answer, s/he is out. The drill continues in the same way.
Students needs to be careful and follow the numbers.
