Warmers, fillers and coolers

First Conditionals Warmer (If/ will)- Problem Weekend

Get students to ask each other about next weekend and chat about it for 5 or 10 minutes, then stop them and ask if there are any potential problems with their partner’s plans- e.g. “If you get up late your Mum will be angry.”

Ask the students with that potential problem to defend themselves, e.g. “If my Mum gets angry, I will just lock my bedroom door until she goes to work”. The students can then think of continuing problems and solutions (”If you lock your door your Mum will knock it down with a hammer”, “If she knocks it down with a hammer I will jump out of the window” etc. etc) and declare a winner when the other person runs out of ideas.

Simple Past Simple Warmers One- Guess when

After a brief “How was your week/ weekend?” chat, during which you elicit and write the days and dates on the board, tell the class one thing you did on one of those days. They must repeat the sentence back, but with “you” and their guess of which day you did it, eg. “You had a picnic on Sunday”. They then continue in pairs or threes.

The same game can also be played with months, years, ages etc. in the past- maybe in future weeks as more grammar such as ‘ago’ is introduced

Simple Past Simple Warmers 2- Then make the story of my life

Moving on from general chat (if possible), ask one of the students what time they got up on Saturday and get them to give a whole sentence reply (”I got up at 7 am”). Try to guess their next action on that day (”Next/ then you had a shower”) and get them to tell you if that is really what they did next (”Yes, that’s right” or “No, I didn’t. Next I made a cup of tea”). Ask the class to guess each later stage of that student’s day. Continue in pairs.

Simple Past Simple Warmers Three- Irregular tennis

In teams, students take turns ’serving’ with infinitive forms (go, do, want) and ‘returning’ with the simple past form. Mime the ball going backwards and forwards across the classroom to speed their responses up. Score as per tennis, but perhaps changing service after every point rather than every game.

Can also be done with scoring of other sports, such as volleyball, or even with a real beach ball.

Warmers Summary

The points that a good warmer has to have are:

1. Links naturally into the chat etc. at the beginning of the class or has a prop, novelty value etc. that suddenly gets students’ attention.

2. Is easy to explain, or even better can just be demonstrated

3. Can be made as short as 5 minutes but extended if needed

4. Is fun

5. Uses the target language and/ or language from last week

6. Does not ask too much of students in terms of creativity or language while they are not yet warmed up