Fun with the young: Top Ten warm-up activities

1.     Alphabet Game (Pre-Junior upwards)

Aim: to practice the alphabet and vocabulary associated with it.

One child begins by saying ‘a’ and the second child must make a word e.g. apple. The second child says the next letter ‘b’ and so on. The pattern continues and students challenge themselves to make words in order, from a to z, within the time limit.

2.     Monster Drawing (Junior upwards)

Aim: to practice listening skills together with colours and parts of the body.

Learners draw what the teacher tells them: e.g. “This monster has two heads. One green and one blue”, then “It has three tails and five legs”. And so on. Finally they compare their drawings and comment on any differences.

3.     Animal Game (Pre-junior upwards)

Aim: to revise/introduce animals

Play the game of miming and animal noise making and asking the children to identify who you are and to say whether they like or don’t like the animal you are miming. Of course, after the game has been introduced, the children themselves take turns and mime the animals.

4.     Answer me (elementary upwards)

Aim: to practice Present Simple for routines.

Teacher gives out blank pieces of paper and gets students to write a time on each before explaining the game. Teacher collects the pieces, jumbles them and then gives them out at random to the class. Preferably each student receives approximately five pieces. Students must ask each other questions in pairs to obtain the answer on their piece of paper e.g.

Student A: “What time do you get up?”

Student B: “At quarter past seven”.

If Student A has “7:15” on one of his/her cards, s/he can discard it. The first student with no cards left is the winner.

5.     Words get up and walk about (Junior upwards)

Aim: to practice lexical sets kinesthetically.

In pairs, students write down a list of words, taking them from between three and five general categories e.g. animals, colours, furniture, describing people etc. At this point the teacher can set the categories based on the recently taught vocabulary. The words and the categories themselves are written on separate slips of paper. The teacher collects the slips and jumbles them and then gives them out at random to the class. Every student gets a slip. The aim is for the students to put their words into an appropriate category and form a circle around it, with the topic word standing in the middle of it.

6.     Dress this boy/girl (Kids upwards)

Aim: to revise/introduce clothes.

Quick and simple. Use Slide NC46 (Human Body) and ask the children to come at the board and dress the boy and then the girl appropriately. Children themselves name and then draw the different clothing items in order to cover the naked human body. Teacher can give prompts such as dressing depending on the seasons (summer or winter).

 Ζερβού Ελένη, Καθηγήτρια Αγγλικών