Great Warmers For The Classroom

Before you start any class you need to warm up your students and get them thinking in English. This doesn’t always have to be related to the topic, but it’s nice if you can establish a link between the two. Just remember, don’t make it too difficult and present the students with a warmer that requires a skill they haven’t learned yet. Here are some tried and tested classroom warmers.

Brainstorm

A great way to start, especially if your students are intermediate level, is simply to write a question on the board that in some way pertains to the topic and let them discuss in small groups. For example, if you are doing a lesson about friendship, regardless of what the grammar topic is, get them to brainstorm what they think makes a good friend. You shouldn’t worry about being too linguistically correct here; it’s just to get their brains working!

Questionnaire

This is similar to the brainstorm, but instead of having the students sit down in small groups, you get them to walk around and conduct short interviews with each other. If your lesson that day is based around film, set them off with the task of finding the most popular genre of film. Start by boarding different examples like horror and romance, then let them get creative and off they go.

Using pictures

When students are still at lower levels, you’ll find that using visuals is a great way to help prompt them into speaking, and pictures and the most practical way to do this. Start by placing different images relating to your lesson around the room. After boarding a few questions you can then simply get the students to walk around the room and answer the questions about the different pictures.

Marking homework

This isn’t an ideal starter for every lesson, but sometimes it’s useful, if several class members are late and you don’t want to start with half of the group, or maybe they had a special homework tasks that needs some specific designated time. Instead of just going through the homework together, get them to check in pairs, if you need to you can board questions to help them compare their answers before marking it as a whole class.