Our Top 5 Warmer Ideas
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?
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.
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.