Wonderful Warmers

Throughout the CELTA they teach you the importance of a 'warmer'. A 5-15 minute activity designed to lead students in to a particular topic. Of course, warmers don't just have to be related to your topic, they can be planted into any lesson just to wake your students up or get their brain working again after a rather dull grammar point, for instance. There are hundreds of warmers out there and my list is no way comprehensive. Below is a small selection of warmers that I find to be quite successful in classes...

1) Hangman- self explanatory and can be used in all settings
2) 20 questions- a simple game with card categories. 1 student picks up a card category, writes down their chosen subject and the other students must ask them 'yes' and 'no' questions to decipher the subject they have written down. This is great for practising closed questions and encouraging speaking in group situations. If you have a person category, ensure your students know to write down someone that everyone will know otherwise they could be asking questions forever!
3) Boggle- draw a 5x5 square on the board and encourage students to help you fill in the box with letters. Then give students a time limit to find as many words as they can within the box- the real rules of boggle i find to be too tricky for language learners. As long as students find words within the box, not using the same letters twice, I'm not strict about the letters touching. I choose to give points for the longest word and the person with the most words.
4)stop the bus! the classic-english-teacher favourte that involves no preparation. Simply write on the board a table with 5 categories. These categories can be as varied as you like- from vocabulary (e.g animals, food, clothes, jobs) to more specific grammatical reviews (e.g 4 letter adjectives, 4 letter verbs etc..)
5)Back slap- this is a game where post-its are stuck to students' back. This game is similar to 'yes and no', where students walk around the room asking yes and no questions in order to guess the person/thing that is stuck to their back.
6)Paper airplanes- this is one that I stole from Dave's esl cafe. Get your students to create paper airplanes and then ask students to write an adjective inside the plane. The aim is then to fly your airplane to someone else in the room- that person reads the adjective and reads aloud the superlative, comparative or even the opposite of this adjective. As a fun final activity, I get students to stand on one side of the classroom and fly their airoplanes across to the other side to see whose plane can go the furthest.