Here are a few warmers and speaking activities that I have found work well. They can be used equally well with a group or one-to-one classes and can easily be adapted to online teaching.
- Five mystery items game – speaking activity
Target language: yes/no questions in present or past tenses, and short answers.
Level: Pre-intermediate and above
Time: 20 minutes or even up to 60 minutes with chatty more advanced students!
This is a great speaking activity to do with your students in the first class after their holidays. It can also be played after a weekend, especially a long weekend, or in a first-class to get to know your student/s or for them to get to know each other interacting in pairs or small groups.
The way to play: Each student writes down 5 mystery items about their holidays, weekend, or about their life if a first-class – in a one-to-one class setting the teacher pairs up with the student and also writes down 5 items.
When teaching online using Zoom or a similar platform, you can write your 5 items on the whiteboard while giving the student/s some time to think and write theirs on a piece of paper and then dictate them to you to write up on the whiteboard below yours.
You then take turns to ask each other yes/no questions to try to guess what events the items represent, what happened, etc. Encourage follow up questions to produce more speaking. The activity ends when all items have been guessed and crossed out on the whiteboard. From my experience, I find this activity usually works really well as a springboard for a lot of enjoyable natural conversation.
In a group class, the pairs could report to the rest of the class what they have found out about their partner , their partner’s holidays/ weekend, etc.
- Coffee-pot – warmer or end-of-class speaking game
Target language: Questions in the present simple and short answers
Level: Beginner to intermediate
Time: 10 minutes
This is a very simple but fun game to practise asking questions in the present simple. It can be played in pairs or in small groups, or teacher-student in a one-to-one class setting. You, the teacher, or a student thinks of an everyday activity. For example, to brush your teeth. “Coffee-pot” is used as an imaginary verb to ask questions about the mystery activity to find out when, where, with whom, etc, you or the student does the activity to try to guess what it is. For example, “Do you coffee-pot in the morning?”, “Do you coffee-pot in the kitchen?” etc. When you or a student guesses the other person’s activity then you or that student thinks of another activity and the game continues with you or the student/s asking questions to try to guess the activity.
- Animal, mineral or vegetable
Target language: Yes/no questions
Level: Intermediate and above
Time: 10 -15 mins
This game can be used as a warmer or an end of class fun activity. It’s a great way to get students practising asking questions.
The way to play: The teacher or a student thinks of an object. The other students or the teacher asks “Animal, mineral or vegetable?” To which the person who is thinking of the object has to answer considering the origin of the materials the object is made of. For example, a pencil would be mineral and vegetable (the lead being mineral and the wood vegetable), a leather handbag would be animal or a USB drive mineral ( plastic and metal ). The next questions should be typically to find out exactly what the object is made of, what it is used for, where you can find it, whether or not the person has one, how big it is, etc
For example, Is it made of wood? Is it made of plastic? Do you have one in your room? Do you use it to study? Can you hold it your hand? etc.
- Naughts and crosses ( Tick-tack-toe )
Target language: past simple or past participles (or both)
Level: Beginner to intermediate
Time: 10 minutes
This is an ideal warmer activity for a lesson in which you have planned for your students to practise using the past simple. For example, a lesson talking about a past holiday or telling a story or an anecdote, etc.
The way to play: Prepare a naughts and crosses grid with verbs in the infinitive. Students in 2 teams (or in a one-to-one class teacher and student) take turns to choose a verb. To get the square, they must say the past simple of the verb, pronouncing and spelling it correctly. The team, or student, that manages to get three squares in a row is the winner.
With a more advanced group, you can ask them to say both the past simple and the past participle of the verb. Or for a lesson focusing on using the present perfect you could use this warmer just to review the past participles of the verbs that students will need to use later in the lesson.
Other ways to use naughts and crosses could be to review adjectives, getting students to say the opposite adjectives of the adjectives on the grid in order to get the squares.
With higher-level students, it could even be used to review nouns and prepositions, collocations, verbs and dependent prepositions, idioms, etc.
- Sentence scrabble
Target language: vocabulary and grammar practice
Level: intermediate / upper-intermediate
Time: 10 minutes
This activity could be used at the end of a lesson to encourage students who tend to answer in rather short sentences to express themselves in longer sentences.
The way to play: The teacher ( or a student ) begins by saying a word. Then a student ( or the teacher if in a one-to-one class) says a sentence incorporating that word. Points are given for each word if the sentence is correct. Any incorrect words or grammatical mistakes are subtracted from the total of points as minus points. Then the next student has to say a sentence incorporating one of the words from the previous sentence but without repeating any of the other words. And so on and so forth.
The students soon realise that they get more points the longer the sentence is and are thus encouraged to construct longer sentences using more vocabulary and more complex grammatical structures!
Erwin Ebens
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