Online education is going through a difficult but exciting time. This new situation poses great challenges for all of us, and we want to help make the transition from personal education to online education as smooth as possible.

This is what guided us to make BOOKR Class free of charge for this period as a first step.

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.

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. 

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

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.

In this task, a pair of learners have to rely on each other. You can give every pair two pictures with different things missing on each or two completely different pictures. Either way, their task is to ask and answer questions about their partner’s picture, so that they can complete their own picture. With older learners, you can use this activity with missing parts of a conversation or letter.  

Ask the learners to go around the classroom and interview their classmates about their favourite books, food, etc. so everyone has the opportunity to ask and answer questions. At the end of this communicative task, students can introduce their classmates’ ideas in the first-person singular or reported speech.

This activity always starts with a planning and drawing part.

Prepare a bunch of interesting or funny questions beforehand. One of the learners picks one and answers it. The others have to find out what the question was. Learners can play this activity in small groups to have more turns.

Using the cards from the previous task or by providing them with all the sentences from the listening material, the learners’ task is to put these cards into the order they hear them. Always let them listen to the recording at least twice; firstly, to work on the task and secondly, to check their work.

Who says that a recording must be part of a listening activity?

This one is similar to an information gap activity but, in this case, only the teacher has got all the information. The teacher describes a picture and the learners attempt to recreate it. This exercise can be perfectly tailored to the learners’ needs and is suitable, no matter what the topic is.

Even if it’s a story or just a set of instructions, this activity is good for both improving the learners’ listening as well as assessing their comprehension skills. 

Here are some activity ideas with songs we have for you to exploit the many many opportunities songs offer:

Ask a learner to tap the rhythm of a song or nursery rhyme everyone is familiar with. Can the class find out which song it was?

If tapping out the rhythm is too challenging, they can hum the tune as well. In both cases, sing the song together after the activity.

This can be a great warm-up activity for new topics. 

Form two groups who stand in two separate lines 20 metres away from each other. One learner stands between the two groups.

Each group has to choose a song to sing at the same time. Which song can the learner in the middle recognise first?

Everybody loves listening to music in their free time, so ask each student to write their favourite song on a piece of paper, pick one weekly and create a listening task with a gap-filling exercise from the lyrics.

Encourage your learners to tap into their potential and rewrite lyrics of popular songs. Can they turn simple sentences into more sophisticated texts? Can they change the trivial content into something meaningful? Turn text analysis into a creative writing task.

Join our teacher community and enjoy our further activity tips and teaching resources.