Simple Simple Past warmers

If there is one group of students who usually need to be warmed up before you can get going and almost always appreciate your efforts to do so, it is low level adults. Teenagers and higher level students can need to be convinced that a game is not a waste of time or childish and sometimes need easing into fun stuff slowly and with clear justifications, but lower level adults need to and want to start with a bang.

Despite the low level of language Beginner and Elementary students can produce and therefore sometimes the juvenile level that humour etc. in English can be reduced to, they will not necessarily appreciate you bringing in the beach balls etc. that you could use to liven up the simple syllabus with younger kids (although sometimes they do!). The trick, then, is to find sit down games you can play with little language and basic instructions and using the same or similar language week after week. Below are some suggestions of warmers you can use with the Simple Past, which should also give you ideas for similar activities you can fit into the language you are covering now.

Simple Simple Past Warmer 1: 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 Simple Past Warmer 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. 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 later stages of that student’s day. Continue in pairs.

Simple Simple Past Warmer 3: 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.

There are many more just for this one grammar point, but it might be more useful to give the points that a good warmer has to have:

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
Any more warmers for this grammar point? Any classics for other grammar points? Any requests? Comment below:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 11:49 amand is filed under TEFL, Teaching, Teaching low levels, Teaching teenagers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.