Our Top 5 Warmer Ideas

BOOKRClass | 2020.11.06

The way you start your English class determines the whole lesson: it engages students, makes them enthusiastic about the English lesson and helps them focus on learning English. The first few minutes of the lesson is also a great time to activate their background knowledge. In order to raise their energy levels and grab their attention, we suggest doing the following activities in the target language.

1. What’s in the box?

Put 3-4 objects in a shoebox which somehow relate to the topic of the lesson.
Ask a learner to come to the front and describe the object based only on touch.
Depending on their level they can describe the objects using only adjectives (small, soft, furry), or by making simple sentences (‘It’s round’, ‘We play with it outside’).
Can the others guess what it is?

2. Queue

How much do you like TV series? How old are you? Are you a cat or a dog person? You can ask the learners basically anything, and their task is to stand in a queue according to their preferences. They can only talk in English, of course. This way the teacher can get to know the learners and the learners can also get to know each other better.

3. Blobs

Encourage your learners to mingle and get to know each other a bit more. Shout out a keyword and let them stand in smaller groups based on their preferences. The trick here is to encourage them to talk to each other and to have them define the groups or blobs.

For example, if the keyword is ‘books’, there might be one blob of students who love reading, another who has read Harry Potter books and another who prefers watching movies to reading books.

4. Jumping the line

You can get to know your students better or you can revise previous topics and structures with the help of this game.

Draw an imaginary line in the middle of the classroom and ask your students yes-no questions.
Come up with statements about classroom materials or offer two options.
Students need to decide which side they are on: yes or no, true or false, this or that.

5. Say something

Ask your students to stand up and hand out cards with one word written on them.

Depending on the material you are covering, you can hand out nouns, colours, past forms of verbs, phrasal verbs, wh-question words, etc. Students should either ask their classmate a question using the word, or give a definition of it and ask a classmate to guess the word. If they can ask a proper question or give an accurate definition and their partner can answer correctly, they can take a seat. The next student who gets the chance is the one who answered the first student, and so on.

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