Warm-up Activities
методическая разработка по английскому языку

Warm-up Activities

Kulebakina I.A.

School 100

Saint Petersburg

Warm-up activities are essential in the English classroom. Students often come to class tired or with other things on their minds, so it’s good to ease them into a class rather than immediately hitting them with a demanding grammar or vocabulary task. With a good warmer you can put your students into English mode [məud] состояние, режим  – attentive,  interested and ready to participate. A warmer can also serve to review language from a previous lesson or prime the class for a new topic.  Warm-ups are designed to grab students’ attention and motivate them to participate.

The best warm-up activities are all about getting students engaged, and providing them with new interesting ways to work together and connect. They should make the students feel stimulated and allow for personalisation where possible. Don’t error correct during warm-up activities. The emphasis ['emfəsɪs] should be on fluency and building trust and rapport [ræ'pɔː] хорошие взаимоотношения.

What makes a good warm-up activity?

Effective warm-up activities for teaching English should be:

• Considerate towards your students’ emotional/physical state when they enter the classroom (for example, if students are tired, use a warm-up with movement to energize ['enəʤaɪz] them)
• Simple to understand and execute ['eksɪkjuːt] выполнять
• Easy to carry out, i.e., require little to no preparation 
• Age- and level-appropriate
• Time-efficient [ɪ'fɪʃ(ə)nt]  эффективный  (not take up too much time)
• Interesting and appealing привлекательный
• Leading towards the lesson content or target language
• Using mostly known vocabulary to increase students’ participation and confidence

Now I want to show you some of the warm-ups, which I use for the beginning of the lessons, and they are easy to carry out.

The A to Z game

Give students a theme, for example, jobs, things you take on holiday, food. Write the letters A to Z on the board. Teams of students must race to write an appropriate word next to each letter on the board.

I make a rule that they can’t use proper nouns. If you want to increase the difficulty and if you have a small class, you can make a rule that if 2 teams have the same word, it doesn’t count which forces students to think more creatively [kriˈeɪtɪvli].

This is a great way to reinforce [ˌriːɪn'fɔːs] укреплять the alphabet and vocabulary with students.

Letter string dictation

This is a great way to lead into the topic that you want to cover in the class and also serves as a simple activity to help students recognise letters of the alphabet. Think of a couple of questions for students to discuss in pairs or groups. Dictate them as a long string of letters. For example: whatsyourfavouritecolour?  After dictating the letter strings, students should attempt to form the questions and then discuss and report back to class.

For more advanced students try dictating the letters backwards and then have the students decode [ˌdiː'kəud] расшифровывать the question. This is more challenging because students will find it more difficult to predict the next letter and therefore must focus on the letters being dictated. Here is an example.

Hangman

This popular filler can also be a great way to start a lesson with learners. Just put a recently learned words on the board and let the students take it in turns to guess a letter. 

Spelling Practice Game:

1. All students stand up.
2. The teacher says a word.
3. The first student must say the first letter.
4. The next student must say the second letter, etc.
5. If incorrect, the student has to sit down. The teacher says a new word and the game continues until there are only one or two students remaining.

Word Association

Give an initial [ɪ'nɪʃ(ə)l] начальный word, for example, banana and each student takes it in turns to say a word which they associate with the previous word. If the connection isn’t obvious, challenge требовать the student to justify their choice. 

Make the most words

Write a topical vocabulary item on the board. In twos, threes or individual students make as many new words from it as they can. Use longish seed первоисточник words such as literature. Score teams a point per word and award a bonus ['bəunəs] приз point for the longest.

What does your name mean?

When I teach the topic «Adjective of character» I use this warmer. Students can  use a dictionary or student’s book, they find and write down an appropriate adjective that begins with each letter of their first name. For example: 

Name five or ten

Have students think of 5 or 10 items that fit particular criteria [kraɪ'tɪərɪə]. For example:

• Jobs where you have to wear a uniform
• Sports that are played with a ball

Quick questions

Write a list of two or three questions on the board, which introduce the theme of the lesson. For example, if you are going to talk about books, you could write: What’s your favourite book? What was the last book you read? What kind of books do you prefer? etc. Give the students 5-10 minutes to discuss the questions and then have students report back to the class.

Mixed-up question or anagram ['ænəgræm] variation

It’s always good to start the class with a question. Write a good one on the board but mix up the word order, then challenge students to reconstruct the question and then discuss it in pairs or small groups. For example: most item you have the ever expensive what’s bought?

Alternatively, write a question on the board but this time scramble the letters of each word. For example: tahw si ruyo seealirt rommey?

Prepositions of Place Memory Game

I use this game when I teach the topic «Preposition of place». The grammar and vocabulary are pretty simple and the students seem to enjoy practicing it. Students must answer different preposition questions. Where is the T-shirt? Or Where is the bag?

Picture Prompt

This is a very simple warm-up that can be used with teens. The way it works is that you put up a picture on the screen. Depending on the level of students, there are a number of things you can do.

Beginners can simply list the things they see in the picture: dog, man, tree, house, etc. You can also ask something like, “How does the man feel? What is the boy doing?”

Intermediate students could do a similar thing but make sentences. For example, “The man is playing with the dog. The boy is coming out of the house and I think he’s going to school.”

Advanced students could make up a story based on what they see. Or, give an explanation for what’s happening.

Just a Minute

Just a Minute is a very simple activity that you can use to get your students talking. Write a bunch of general categories on the board such as jobs, hobbies, dreams, movies, food, etc.

Put the students into groups of 4 and they can number themselves 1-2-3-4. Then, ask one of the students can stand up and throw a paper airplane or a ball at the board and whatever word it gets closest to is the topic for the first student or they can choose a paper with a number.

One student from a group must talk about that topic for one minute without stopping and if he/she stops or has a long pause, they’ve lost the challenge. For higher-level students, you can require each group member to ask the speaker a follow-up question at the end of each round.

Storytelling

This is a great warm-up activity for encouraging teamwork and practicing vocabulary and grammar.

Ask each student to give you one word they know. This can be a noun, an adjective, a preposition, anything they want to include in the story. Collect the words by writing them on the whiteboard. When you have all the words from your students written on the board, let them collaborate to tell a story with them. If they need help, you can ask questions like “How shall we start?” “Which word shall we use first?” or “What comes next?”

Check off the words as the class tells the story, and make sure everyone gets a chance to contribute!

In conclusion, I want to say that warm-up activities for English classes are an important teaching tool and often make a lesson because

• They can activate students’ prior ['praɪə] предшествующий knowledge about a topic, grammar point or vocabulary set.
• They can engage the learners from the start of the lesson and help them learn English.
• Warm-ups are an ideal way to review material from previous classes.
• They help to build rapport between students and teachers.
• Depending on what you do, they can be quite enjoyable and fun for the students.