Warm-up Activities and Games

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

Write a topical target word vertically down the board, for example, WINTER. In twos or threes, students attempt to come up with the longest word that begins with each letter. Give teams a point per word and a bonus point for the longest.    Waterfall    Industrious    Nausea    Terrified    Empty    Retailer

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.

17. Word Race with a bell

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.