Warmers and fillers

All levels
Five short activities suitable for engaging attention, changing the pace within a
lesson, or giving a sense of conclusion to a lesson.

Bags of vocabulary

Life mime

Phonemic hangman

Read around the room

Scrambled English

Bags of vocabulary
All levels
A game to extend and consolidate students' vocabulary.

At the end of a lesson, give out two or three slips of paper to each student and
ask them to write on each one a new word or phrase they learned in the lesson.
On the back of each one, they should write a good, not necessarily literal,
translation in their own language. Collect these in a box or bag and explain that
this is the 'vocabulary bag' for the group/course.
At the beginning of the next lesson or a lesson soon afterwards, produce the
vocabulary bag and ask students in pairs to take two or three slips per pair.
One student should look at a slip and 'test' their partner by asking them to
translate the word or phrase on the slip. You could specify English to L1/L1 to
English or leave it up to the students to decide.

Note:
(a) Because of its ongoing nature, this can become a regular slot at the
beginning and/or end of every lesson. You could also suggest that students
create their own individual vocabulary bag for self-study out of class.
(b) As far as possible, let the students decide on their translations. If you speak
their L1 you might want to intervene in cases of severe mistranslation!
This filler is particularly useful if you are teaching monolingual groups.
Life mime
Elementary to Pre-Intermediate
A lively activity to give students speaking practice.

Tell students you are going to say five facts about your life and afterwards you
want them to repeat the facts back to you. Then mime the information to the
class, and when you have finished elicit it from the students.
Depending on the level of the class, it could be information about your family,
house, (eg. I have two children and a cat, I live in a small apartment on the
fifth floor), your daily routine, what you did before the lesson, your last holiday,
etc. The students then do the same in pairs.
Note:
(a) If the students have misunderstood something, mime the information for
them again, don't tell them.
(b) Unless you are a confident actor, practise before you do this!
This is adapted from an idea by Julie Shehata.

Phonemic hangman
All levels
A new twist of a popular game, to help students revise the phonemic alphabet.

Play this in exactly the same way as traditional hangman (see note (a) below).
For example, the word car, instead of being C A R would be /ka:/. Instead of
calling out letters, the students must suggest the sounds in the word.
Note:
(a) In the traditional game, one person (here, the teacher, at least at first)
thinks of a word and writes on the board one dash for every letter in that word.
(eg. for the word car, write _ _ _ ). The 'guessers' (students) try to find the word
by calling out possible letters. If the word includes a letter suggested, the
teacher writes it in the correct position; if the word does not include the letter,
the teacher draws one line in the picture of the scaffold and hanging figure.
Also note down the letters incorrectly suggested. The idea is to find the
complete word before the picture is completed and thereby to save the
hanging man.
(b) It is easier if students have a phonemic chart on the wall or in a course book
or dictionary to refer to; you might want to encourage them to look for the
words in their dictionaries.
Read around the room
Intermediate to Upper-Intermediate
An enjoyable task to develop students' reading skills.

Prepare the room before the students arrive or while they are busy with a task
during the lesson. Stick up around the room a number of cartoons, quotations,
advertisements, jokes...anything with an intrinsic interest value. Ask the
students to move around the class and read as many of these as possible. Feed
back briefly by simply asking the students which one they liked the best.
Note: Possible sources of materials could be:
• quotations - reference books of collected quotations; 'soundbites'
columns in British newspapers
• jokes - collections in books, especially children's jokes
• advertising - glossy magazines; Sunday colour supplements of British
newspapers
• cartoons - published collections; newspapers or magazines
• trivia - published collections
Variation: Do the same thing with student-produced writing to encourage peer-
reading for interest/pleasure.

Scrambled English
Elementary to Pre-Intermediate
A simple but effective way of practising sentence structure.

Write on the board or on an OHT the words that make up a sentence or

sentences in 'word clouds' eg.

The students have to unscramble the sentences. (What's the lesson about
today? Look at page 29 to find out).
As well as lesson lead-ins, you could scramble sentences to revise particular
grammatical structures (e.g. I was surfing the net last night when I found a
really good travel site), jokes (e.g. doctor-patient, children's jokes), trivia
(useless pieces of information), etc.

Variations:
(a) To increase the challenge, give a time limit and ask the students to work in
silence and shout out when they have unscrambled the words.
(b) Dictate the words one by one (in a mixed-up order) and then ask the
students to work out the sentence(s).