I was actually looking for warm ups for large classrooms on your page and I couldn t find them. Could you please provide me with some quick interesting warm ups? I tried some from other websites, but my students didn t like them and i thought about seeking your help if youu don t mind. Thanks.
My favourite warm-ups are:
1. Call my bluff
Students work with dictionaries (I usually do it in groups of 3-5).
They choose some difficult words and write 4 definitions for each. Out of the four definitions only one should be true. The other groups will then listen to the definitions and have to guess which one is the correct one. It’s fun!
2. Guess my word
Pairwork. One student describes a word and the other one has to guess what it is. I usually do it to review vocabulary, so they can use words that they’ve learnt recently.
3. Question words review
Brainstorm all the question words they’ve learnt so far then ask them to ask each other random questions for a few minutes. Then, they report back to the class what they’ve learnt about their partners.
4. Translation ‘Chinese Whispers’
If you use translation in your lessons, prepare one, short sentence in English (reviewing any vocabulary or grammar) on the top of an A4 sheet for every student.
Then everybody translates their sentence, folds the sheet so that only the last sentence is visible and passes it on to the student on their left.
This student translates the L1 sentence to English, folds the sheet and passes it to the next student. They keep doing that (English to L1, L1 to English, English to L1 etc.) until the original sentence gets back to each student.
Then you can compare the original (your) sentence and the end result. The last one is often very different from the first one and is usually hilarious.
Have fun!
