FACULTAD DE CIENCIAS DE LA EDUCACIÓN

ESPECIALIDAD DE LENGUA INGLESA

CURSO: PRÁCTICA PRE-PROFESIONAL A

Teaching Ideas: Starting a lesson

Remember: warmers are just that, they warm up the class. Normally they don’t teach
anything new, so:
- Keep them short
- Get everyone involved
- Make them easily do-able
- Link them to the learning point of the lesson, or to the revision of last lesson
- Make sure students talk in sentences, not individual words
- Get the first example from the class to ensure they are on track
- Set a time limit
- Monitor to see what’s happening and what mistakes are being made, if any.

IDEAS AND ACTIVITIES

1. Back to the board.
Get the class into groups. Each group sends a delegate to sit with his/her back to the board.
You write up a word/phrase from a recent lesson, or to introduce today’s lesson. The groups
must prompt their delegate to say the word, using mime, explanations etc. The first delegate
to correctly guess the word is the winner. Then he or she joins the group again, and the next
two delegates come and sit with their backs to the board, ready to guess the next word or
expression.

Examples: theme of school – teacher/lesson/homework/whiteboard/punishment

theme of holidays – package tour, hotel, self-catering, laze around

2.Hangman
Choose a key word that can introduce the theme of the lesson. Draw a hangman, and elicit
from the group the rules. Then one by one the class suggests a letter.
Ideas for themes: accommodation transport celebrities

3.Spot the difference

This can work in various ways. Using visual aids, choose a picture like a cartoon and make a
copy of it. Then take out or add in some details so there are 10 differences between pictures
A and B. Set the scene by eliciting from the group what they think they’ll see in the picture.
Then give pairs a couple of minutes to find as many differences as possible. A good option is
to interrupt after a while, and form new pairs – they then have to recap the differences they
have found, and continue. The language focus can vary from ‘There is/are’ – on the left/in
the background – he is holding/they are playing etc.
An alternative is to find pictures on a similar theme – holiday brochures will give lots of
similar hotel shots, etc. Tell group that they all have similar pictures, and without showing –
just by describing – they must see who has the most similar picture.

4. Find someone who

Choose a language area like tenses, prepositions, vocabulary topics, and prepare a set of
questions along these lines: Find someone who has been to more than 10 countries/who can
cook/who would never ... /who spends more than one hour in front of the TV. Check the
questions are clear to everyone. It’s a good idea to leave the final question blank for them to
think of a similar one. Then ask them to stand up and find one name for each question. Set a
time limit. Either take feedback from class, or ask students to compare their answers after
the activity: Who said what?

5. Diary writing
It’s important to set the scene so they know what kind of writing is wanted. One technique is
to ask students a series of questions that cover areas you want them to practice – they
listen, but don’t write. Sample questions – what did you have to eat yesterday? Who cooked
it? What did it taste like? What happened after the meal? What would you like to change
about yesterday?
When you have finished, you can either ask them to discuss their answers in pairs, or they
can write directly. You can monitor for errors/progress now, or take the writing in, or make
notes of errors and feedback to the group, or ask them to find who has the most
similar/different diary entries.

6. Quiz/questionnaires
These can either be a set of questions on your chosen topic or a variant of ‘Find someone
who ...’ with questions like ‘how many people have more than one brother,’ ‘which person
spent most money last week.’ Again, it works well to leave the students to write the final
question. Then either they can work individually or in pairs to find the answers, or they can
mingle.
Another variant is for them to use the questions as a basis for conversation with a partner,
and they fill in not their own answers, but their partner’s. Take feedback.

7. Odd one out

This is easy to organise and fun. The easiest option is to put 4 - 6 similar vocabulary items in
a list and students in pairs have to explain which one doesn’t belong. You should choose
from 3 – 8 sample lists, perhaps all on the same topic area. This can be done to focus on
grammatical irregularities, phonology, spelling, meaning, etc. Students should justify their
answers. Typical ideas might include: things found in the kitchen, animals, sports, colours,
irregular past tenses, vocab from this morning’s text, words with two syllables, slang words
etc. Then perhaps ask students in pairs to think of another 2 examples – and swap their
examples with their neighbours.

8. Get in line
Students have to order themselves according to criteria you select, such as height (very
elementary), birthdays, number of siblings, hours slept, minutes spent on homework,
favourite colours, distance from school of accommodation, optimism about the future, etc.
Let them organise themselves as quickly as possible – but take feedback to ensure that the
answer is right. They should justify where they are: I’m here because I’m taller than Jean but
not as tall as Bob, etc. Afterwards, see if they can recall, in pairs, the exact sequence of the
group.

9. Sentence completion
Either dictate or put of slips of paper the beginning of sentences on a certain topic. Students
complete individually. Sentence heads could be:
Yesterday after school I ...
I’d love to live in . . .
My favourite colour is ...
The text yesterday was about ...
After 4 – 6 sentence heads, students compare in pairs to see who is most similar/different
and why. Take feedback.

10. Make words from grids

To revise vocab items, create a grid as follows:

f o o d
e
g
g i n

with a certain number of hidden key words on a topic. Decide – and tell the group – if they
are up/down, horizontal etc. Set a time limit. They work individually, then compare. An
easier version is to present them with the clues for the words hidden in the grid: something
you eat – you drink it with tonic, etc.

11. Yes/No games

Explain that students must answer your questions naturally and truthfully, but without
saying yes/no. They stand up, you then fire questions at them. If they say yes/no, they sit
down for the duration. The questions can be on a topic, or general: Are you single? Is this
your first time here? Have you ever been to hospital?, etc.
You can help them by giving examples of avoidance language:
Q: Are you English?
A: Of course, what do you think? Isn’t it obvious? Don’t you know?
Afterwards let them play in pairs, each person has one minute as questioner – who traps
their partner most times in 60 seconds?

12. Error awareness

Write 5 – 10 sentences on a topic/grammatical area – or collect them from students’ writing
– with mistakes in. It’s a good idea to have one sentence with no mistakes. Explain what you
have done, and what sort of mistakes there are. Students work individually to spot and
correct errors. Errors typically can be with: prepositions, spellings, count/uncount,
comparative/superlatives, word order, tenses, articles.
An interesting variant is to have A and B sentences: if it is wrong on A, it is right on B, etc.
Have As check together, and Bs check together before you put AB together.

13. Five true, five false

A good variant on quizzes. Write ten sentences or questions on a topic or grammar area.
Five should be true, five false. Areas could include: irregular plurals, life in Peru, the law,
what we did last week, famous people, the weather, items of clothing etc. For example:
Most people wear socks with their shoes.
You wear slippers to school
Individually or in pairs students go through, finding the five true and correcting the five false.
Take feedback. You could then ask pairs to produce their own set of 10 for one another.

14. Match the picture and the words

Various ideas here. You could select a picture or number of pictures, and on separate pieces
of paper have a selection of vocabulary/expressions associated with the pictures. Students
must find a match.
Or: choose pictures with many people, write some mini dialogues which students have to
match to pictures, or to people in pictures. Or give students the dialogue/vocabulary lists
and ask them to predict the pictures – or vice versa.
Take feedback – then give students more pictures and ask them to do the same.

15. Memory tests

These can focus on past classes, vocabulary learnt, mistakes made, readings done etc. A
simple example is to ask students in pairs to remember 5 things about an article or listening
from a recent class. Or you could provide a list of vocabulary/things done with one or two
not done, and students have to find which ones were not covered. Or you could ask students
to sequence vocabulary/events in the class/in the text from memory or from a list.
Take feedback, who has a good memory, and how does he/she use it? You could also ask
pairs to write a memory test at the end of the class for next time.

16. Sentence building

Either write on slips, show or dictate a series of chunks that build a sentence. Do this out of
sequence. The sentence could introduce the topic or recap last lesson, and have a
grammatical, factual, lexical or phonological purpose. Students in pairs recombine the
chunks to find the original sentence:

one of the things about a schoolboy

in the last lesson if you remember
was a short text then we answered
we looked at who was sent to prison

It’s important that students can hear and talk in chunks, so they should practise reading back
their answers with the right chunks. They could then choose sentences from texts/listenings
and do the same for one another.

17. Dictation
There are many interesting variants where students have to process the language they hear.
One example is to dictate a text with factual errors – perhaps about them, the news, what
they did last week, about food and drink etc. They have to write the text correctly.
Another example is a personal dictation: students have to follow your model, but making it
true for them: Today I got up at 5.30 and had frogs for breakfast – they end up with a text
about themselves, which they can compare with their partner’s.
Or you dictate a text with gaps, which they fill. This works well for personal topics like my
last hols, my favourite music. It also works for stories: It was a dark night, Harry felt ...
suddenly he heard ...
Students compare and perhaps continue in the same vein, or vote on most
interesting/dramatic/funny versions.

18. Compliments
This is a nice positive opener. Elicit from students lots of positive adjectives to describe
people and clothes, and put them on the board. You could teach/elicit useful framing
sentences like: wow! I like your ... OR – That’s/those are nice ...
Then students in pairs have one minute to pay as many compliments as possible to their
partners, using as many different adjectives as they can. Listen in and take feedback. They
probably need reminding to use emphatic intonation – so let them do the activity again, with
the partner on their other side.
19. Students write on the board
Give out markers / pieces of chalk and ask each student to write a word/phrase on the board
about themselves, their hobbies, yesterday, their jobs or whatever suits the focus you want.
It helps if they write at the same time. Then give a time limit and tell them to find out who
wrote what, and why.

20. Truth and lies

Choose a topic that suits your lesson or reviews a previous one. Tell students they must talk
to their partners on that topic for a minute, and must tell 2 lies in that time – plausible ones.
You can help by asking a number of questions on the topic for them to listen to, but not
answer. Pairs work together – or the class could mill – and try to work out what the plausible
lies are. Examples: what do you think about smoking? Have you smoked? Do you find the
smell attractive? Should mothers be allowed to smoke?, etc.