184 Part III: Teaching Skills Classes
Warming up
Anyone who speaks a foreign language knows that if you don’t use it, you lose
it. It’s easy to get rusty. And if your mind is full of other matters such as your
job, the bills or your love life, it’s even harder to get your brain in gear.
This is no less true of your students. In between lessons they may forget
what they’ve learnt or they may just be distracted by life. This is where the
warmer comes in. The warmer is a very short activity that gets the students
acclimatised after the previous lesson. Most warmers are for speaking.
Some of my favourite warm-up activities are:
✓ Last letter, first letter: This simple game also tests spelling. It works
best if the students are in a circle. Basically, one person starts the game
by saying a word and the next person has to come up with another word
beginning with the last letter of the previous one.
A chain of words my students recently came up with is: apple, elephant,
taxi, interesting, girl, little, eggs, sugar, robot, train.
As the students get better at the game and improve in their vocabulary,
they develop strategies for catching their classmates out by including
lots of words that end with the same letter or with a difficult letter like ‘x’.
✓ The supermarket game: This very well-known game involves building
up a list of items bought at the supermarket. When it’s your turn you
have to remember all the items on the list in the right order and then
add one more.
To make it more challenging, you can ask students to attach an adjective
to their item, usually starting with the same letter. For example:
I went to the supermarket and I bought a crazy camera.
I went to the supermarket and I bought a crazy camera and a
meaty meal.
I went to the supermarket and I bought a crazy camera, a meaty
meal and a lovely loaf.
✓ Assemble a sentence: Sometimes I write a sentence, perhaps with a con-
nection to the lesson for that day, using a different card for each word.
I shuffle the cards and give one or two to each student. Then I ask the
students to get together and negotiate the correct word order for the
sentence.
