1.
Alter the pacing of your class. If you rush through your class at
full speed, slow things down and take time to ask your students personal
questions based on the materials you are using. If you tend to proceed at a
snail's pace, prepare some additional activities and push yourself to
accomplish more than you usually do.
2.
Ask a student to demonstrate a dance, and assist the student in
explaining the movements in English.
3.
Ask students to name as many objects in the classroom as they can
while you write them on the board.
4.
Ask students to present to the class a gesture that is unique to
their own culture.
5.
Ask students to write one question they would feel comfortable
answering (without writing their name) on an index card. Collect all of the
index cards, put them in a bag, have students draw cards, and then ask another
student the question on that card.
6.
Ask your students if there are any songs running through their
heads today. If anyone says yes, encourage the student to sing or hum a little
bit, and ask the others if they can identify it.
7.
Assign students to take a conversation from their coursebook that
they are familiar with and reduce each line to only one word.
8.
At the end of class, erase the board and challenge students to
recall everything you wrote on the board during the class period. Write the
expressions on the board once again as your students call them out.
9.
Begin by telling your students about an internal struggle between
two sides of your personality (bold side vs. timid side OR hardworking side vs.
lazy side), providing a brief example of what each side says to you. After a
few minutes of preparation in pairs, have students present their struggles to
the class.
10.
Bring a cellular phone (real or toy) to class, and pretend to
receive calls throughout the class. As the students can only hear one side of
the conversation, they must guess who is calling you and why. Make the initial
conversation very brief, and gradually add clues with each conversation. The
student who guesses correctly wins a prize.
11.
Bring a fork, knife, spoon, bowl, plate and chopsticks (if you
have them) to class, and mime eating some different dishes, letting students
guess what they are. Then let your students take a turn.
12.
Bring an artifact from the student's culture to class, and ask
them questions about it.
13.
Bring in some snacks that you think your students haven't tried
before, and invite the students to sample them and give their comments.
14.
Call on a student to draw his or her country's flag on the board,
then teach him or her how to describe the flag to the class (It has three
stripes...).
15.
Choose one topic (food, sports) and elicit a list of examples
(food - chicken, pudding, rice). Then have your student come up with the most
unusual combinations of items from that list(chocolate-beef or wrestling-golf).
16.
Collaborate with your students on a list of famous people,
including movie stars, politicians, athletes, and artists. Have every student
choose a famous person, and put them in pairs to interview each other.
17.
Come to class dressed differently than usual and have students
comment on what's different.
18.
Copy a page from a comic book, white out the dialogue, make copies
for your class, and have them supply utterances for the characters.
19.
Copy pages from various ESL textbooks (at an appropriate level for
your students), put them on the walls, and have students wander around the
classroom and learn a new phrase. Then have them teach each other what they
learned.
20.
Copy some interesting pictures of people from magazine ads. Give a
picture to each student, have the student fold up the bottom of the picture
about half an inch, and write something the person might be thinking or saying.
Put all the pictures up on the board, and let everyone come up and take a look.
21.
Describe something observable in the classroom (while looking
down), and tell students to look in the direction of what you described.
22.
Draw a map of your country or another country that your students
know well. By drawing lines, show students where you went on a trip, and tell
them about it. Then call on several students to do the same. The trips can be
truthful or fictional.
23.
Draw a pancake-shape on the board, and announce that the school
will soon be moving to a desert island. Invite students one by one to go to the
board and draw one thing they would like to have on the island.
24.
Draw a party scene on the board, and invite students to come up
and draw someone they would like to have at the party.
25.
Empty a bag of coupons onto a table, and have students find a
coupon for a product that they have no need for.
26.
Experiment with how you write on the board, altering your writing
style, the size of the letters, the direction you write, and the color of the
chalk/pens.
27.
Explain to your students what it means to call someone a certain
animal (dog, pig, fox) in English, and then ask them what these mean in their
languages.
28.
Fill the board with vocabulary your students have encountered in
previous classes (make sure to include all parts of speech), and get them to
make some sentences out of the words.
29.
Find out what famous people your students admire, and work
together with the class to write a letter to one of them.
30.
Find out what your students are interested in early on in the
semester. Go to the Internet from time to time to collect articles on these
subjects for students to read during the class period.
31.
First, instruct your students to write on a slip of paper the name
of one book, CD, or movie that changed them in some way. Collect the papers,
call out the titles, and ask the class if they can guess who wrote it. Finally,
let the writer identify him or herself, explaining his or her choice.
32.
Give each student a piece of chalk/pen and tell them to fill the
board with pop song lyrics. Then put them in pairs, and get them to use the
words on the board to create a new dialogue.
33.
Give students a reward (such as a candy or a sticker) each time
they take the artificial language in your textbook and turn it into an
authentic question or comment about someone in the class.
34.
Hand a student a ball of yellow yarn. Have him toss it to another
student, while saying something positive about that student and holding onto
the end of the yarn. Continue in this manner until there is a web between all
the students.
35.
Hand each student an index card, and tell them to write down a
sentence that includes an error they have made this week, along with the
correct version of the sentence. Next, tape all of the index cards on the board
for students to look over.
36.
Hang up four different posters (example - one of a world map, one
of a famous singer, one of a flower, and one of Einstein) in the four corners
of your room. Tell students to choose one corner to stand in, and talk about
why they chose that poster.
37.
Have each student make a list of the five most useful phrases for
tourists visiting an English speaking country.
38.
Have students come to the board one by one, draw a poster for an
English language movie (without the title) they think the other students have
seen, and let the other students guess which movie it is.
39.
Hire a musician (flute? harmonica? banjo?) to play for a few
minutes of your class period.
40.
In small groups, have your students design a billboard for
something other than a product (wisdom, humility, friendship, etc.).
41.
Inquire to see if your students have any unusual talents (can
wiggle their ears, can bark like a dog), and encourage them to demonstrate.
42.
Instead of saying "Very good!" all the time, vary the
ways you praise (and correct) students as much as possible.
43.
Instruct your students to find something in their
wallets/purses/pencil boxes, and tell the story behind it.
44.
Invite your students to stand up and explore the classroom from
new angles (look in drawers, under desks, behind posters, on top of cabinets).
Then have students report their findings.
45.
Just a few minutes before the bell rings, call on your students to
choose the ten most useful words they came in contact with during this class
period, then have them narrow it down to the three most useful words.
46.
Pass around some magazines, and have each student choose an ad
that he or she likes. Give students an opportunity to explain their choices.
47.
Play a listening activity from your book an additional time with
the lights turned off.
48.
Play a recording of instrumental music and have some students draw
on the board what the music makes them think of.
49.
Play five very different sounds from a sound effects tape or CD,
and assign students in pairs to create a story based on three of the sounds.
50.
Play music that enhances certain activities (quiet music for a
reading activity, dance music for an energetic TPR activity). Ask your students
for their reactions.
51.
Prepare colored letters of the alphabet on cardboard squares and
put them in a bag. Students must draw a letter from the bag, and work together
to create a sentence on the board. Each student must raise his or her hand to
make a contribution, but the word the student calls out must begin with the
letter he or she chose. Put the expanding sentence on the board, adding words
only when they the grammar is correct.
52.
Prepare several paper bags, each with a different scent inside
(perfume, cinnamon, cheese), pass the bags around the class, and let students
describe what they smell.
53.
Print phrases such as "in the library" "at an
elegant dinner with the Royal Family" "in a noisy bar" "in
a dangerous neigborhood" on separate strips of paper, put them in
envelopes, and tape them to the underside of a few students' desks/tables
before they arrive. Write on the board a useful expression like "Excuse
me. Could I borrow a dollar?" When students arrive, tell them to look for
an envelope under the desks/tables. The ones who find envelopes must say the
sentence on the board as if in the context written on the page. Other students
must guess the context from the student's tone of voice and body language.
54.
Produce a list of commonly used sentence-modifying adverbs on the
board, such as suddenly, actually, unfortunately, and happily. Then launch into
a story, which each student must contribute to, with the rule that everyone
must begin the first sentence of his or her contribution with a
sentence-modifying adverb.
55.
Provide each student with a list of the current top ten popular
songs. Play excerpts from some or all of the songs, and choose some questions
to ask your students, such as: Did you like the song? Have you heard this song
before? How did the song make you feel? What instruments did you hear?
56.
Purchase a postcard for each member of your class, writing his or
her name in the name and address space. Turn them picture side up on a table,
have each student choose one (without looking at the name), then he or she will
write a message to the person whose name is on the other side. If a student
chooses the postcard that has his or her own name on it, the student must
choose again.
57.
Put students in pairs and ask them to guess three items in their
partner's wallet/purse/pencil box.
58.
Put students in pairs. Tell them to converse, but to deliberately
make one grammatical error over and over, stopping only when one student can
spot the other's intentional error.
59.
Put students into small groups to create an application form for
new students to the school.
60.
Put the students in small groups, and ask each group to plan a
vacation for you. They must plan where you will go, what you will do, who you
will go with, and what you will buy. When they are finished, have each group
present their plans.
61.
Review a phrase or sentence that you want students to remember, by
holding a competition to see "Who can say it the loudest/the quietest/the
quickest/the slowest/in the deepest voice/in the highest pitched voice?".
62.
Set up a board in your classroom where students can buy and sell
used items from each other by writing notes in English.
63.
Supply each student with a copy of the entertainment section of
the local newspaper, and tell them to choose somewhere to go next weekend.
64.
Take a particularly uninteresting page from your coursebook, and
put students in groups to redesign it.
65.
Teach on a different side of the room than you usually do.
66.
Tell each student to report the latest news in their country or
city to the class.
67.
Tell your students to practice a conversation from their
coursebook that they are familiar with, but this time they can only use
gestures, no words.
68.
When they are practicing a dialogue, have students play around
with the volume, intonation, pitch, or speed of their voices.
69.
Write "Tell me something I don't know." on the board,
then ask students questions about things they know about and you don't, such as
their lives, cultural background, interests, and work.
70.
Write a common adjacency pair (Thank you./You're welcome OR I'm
sorry./That's alright) on the board. Ask students if they know of any
expressions that could replace one of the ones you just wrote. Write any
acceptable answers on the board.
71.
Write a number of adjectives, such as mysterious, happy, peaceful,
sad, angry, and frustrated on the board. Call out a color, and ask your
students to tell you which adjective they associate with that color.
72.
Write a word on a slip of paper and show it to a student. This
student must whisper it to the second student. Then the second student must
draw a picture of what he or she heard, and show it to the third student. The
third student, then, writes the word that represents the picture and shows it
to the fourth student. Then the fourth student whispers it to the fifth
student.... and so on. This continues until you get to the last student, who
must say the word to the class.
73.
Write an idiomatic expression (such as "It beats me." or
"I'm fed up.") in big letters on the board. Call on a few students to
guess what it means before you tell them.
74.
Write down the names of about five very different people on the
board (a small baby, a rude waiter in a restaurant, a fashion model, a stranger
in a crowd, and a grandfather). Give students a common expression, such as
"Good morning!" or "Sorry!", and ask students how they
might say it differently when talking to a different person.
75.
Write your name on the board vertically, and add a suitable
adjective that begins with each letter of your name. The next step is to invite
students to do the same.
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