What You Can Do with an Egg Timer

8 Fabulous ESL Activities

One great way to put some fun into your ESL class is to introduce some timed activities – it’s amazing how fired
up and competitive students get when they’re on the clock.

8 ESL Activities You Can Do With An Egg Timer

Time to Write!
For this writing activity, your students will write a story as a group. First, you’ll need an idea or prompt to get
them started: you can give them the title of the story or the first line/words. Set your timer to one minute (or
30 seconds depending on your students’ level, and ask them to continue the story. When their time is up they
must pass the sheet of paper to a classmate – it doesn’t matter if they have to stop midsentence. The next
student has to pick up where the previous left off. When all of your students have had the chance to contribute
to the story, you can go on for a bit longer but ask them to wrap it up.

Beat Your Own Record

This is a great activity for one-on-one classes. When a student takes classes alone, he/she doesn’t have the
chance to compete with other students. So give them a chance to compete against themselves! Ask your
student to write as many new words from a recent lesson as they can. Give them one or two minutes to do
this. Count the number of words. Next time, encourage your student to beat their own record.

Race against Time

Make your relay races extra competitive and super charged by giving your teams two minutes to complete the
task. One relay race that works well like this involves word order. Team members must take a word from a pile

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on one desk and run to another desk, where they must place them in the right order one at a time. The team
that completes a sentence first and within the 2-minute limit gets the point.

Ticking Time Bomb

Choose a vocabulary category you’d like to practice. Set your timer to one or two minutes, say an item that falls
into this category, for example “fox” for “animals” and pass the timer to a student. Students must each name
an item in the category and pass the timer to a classmate. The student who has the timer when it goes off loses
a life.

Timed Reading
This is a really useful way to get students focused on a reading task. Simply give them a text, story, or article to
read, together with a set of comprehension questions to answer. Set your timer. Students must complete the
task before the timer goes off. This is also a great way to prepare them for international examinations with
timed reading sections, like the Cambridge examinations.

Think fast!
Give each of your students 60 seconds to name as many items in a category as they can. First, divide them into
two teams. Then, one team picks a card with a category out of a bag, say “professions”. The clock starts ticking
and the first team member starts naming professions. If they get stuck, they may say “pass” and the next team
member continues naming, but they can’t repeat a profession that has already been named. When the 60
seconds are up, you tell the team how many words they named correctly with no repetition. The other team
picks a category and does the same.

Time to Get Organized

Give your class or a team of students one minute to arrange themselves according to age, birthdays,
alphabetical order, etc…They can only speak English for this challenge.

What’s Different This Time?

Arrange a set of objects on a table. Be sure to include plenty of classroom objects. Take a picture, if you can,
with a camera that has a display on the back. Ask a student to look carefully at the arrangement and try to
memorize it. Ask student to leave the classroom. Move some of the objects around, but no more than three.
When student comes back into the classroom, he/she has 60 seconds to tell you what’s different. They must
use prepositions of place: “The blue pen was next to the teacher’s book, but now it’s under it.” Confirm with
the photo you took.

Keep in mind that you can also use a cell phone, in case you don’t have an egg timer –
plenty of phones come with a timer. If you have a computer in the classroom you may
also use an online timer like this Online Egg Timer, which rings at the end of the
countdown just like a real one.
From: http://busyteacher.org/6812-what-you-can-do-with-an-egg-timer-8-fabulous-esl.html
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