24 super easy no-prep warmers and fillers

Here are my favourite easy ways to fill up five minutes with no preparation required.


Getting to know you warmers and fillers

1. True, true, lie. Students write some sentences about themselves. Some are true and some are lies. Then they mingle and can ask one another questions to find out which are lies.

2. CV interview. Draw up the basic structure of a CV on the board. Students in pairs interview each other to make each other's CV.

3. Guess the question. Write some words that are connected to you on the board (eg. your favourite sport, pet's name, age...). Make some easy and some harder. Explain that these are the answers to some questions about you. Students have to guess the questions. Students then do the same for themselves and guess the questions in small groups.

4. What am I like? Students write a few sentences about themselves on a piece of paper. (Tell them not to write about appearance or clothes as this will make it too easy.) Jumble up the papers and redistribute. Students then mingle and ask questions to find out who wrote their paper.

5. Same or different? Write up some sentence starters on the board. (Eg. My favourite place is... A colour that makes me feel good is... My favourite time of day is... I couldn't live without my... When I have free time I like to... I'm looking forward to...) Students complete for themselves and then compare in groups of 2-3. Encourage discussion. Each group feeds back to the class on something they have in common and something they disagree on.


Vocabulary and spelling warmers and fillers

6. Prefixes brainstorm. Put students into small teams. Each team must appoint one writer who will make the list. The team who can list the most correct examples in 2 minutes wins the game. Suggestions: pre-, int-, con-, dis-, mis-, un-, uni-, ob-, mono-, omni-...

7. Suffixes brainstorm. Procedure as above. Suggestions: -able, -ful, -ous, -tion, -sion, -ance, -ity, -ic, -ism, -ive...

8. Words with X number of letters brainstorm. For low levels, start with 4 or 5. Higher levels, more letters. Points are only awarded for correctly spelled words.

9. Rhymes brainstorm. Students in teams have 2 minutes to list words that rhyme with the word you give.

10. Categories brainstorm. This can be good if you split the class into two teams and they make their lists on the board. The team that can list the most in 2 minutes wins. Points are only awarded for correctly spelled words. Clothes, jobs, animals, foods, countries...

11. Shapes quiz. Draw some shapes on the board (circle, oval, triangle, square, rectangle, pentagon, hexagon, octagon...) and students in small groups write down their answers. Include some shapes they will know, and some you think they won't know.

12. Spelling race. Good for revising vocabulary from a previous lesson, or spellings that students persistently get wrong. Divide the class into two; one player from each team must write up the word you call out. First team with the correct spelling gets the point.

13. Back spelling. Arrange students in two lines facing the board and give a word to the two students at the back. They must tell the word to the person in front of them but are not allowed to say anything. Instead they must spell out the word by using their finger like a pencil on the next person's back. First team to accurately pass the word to the front of the line gets the point.

14. Word chain. Students are in two teams. Give a first word and students must continue with a word that starts with the last letter of that word (eg. cat-table-egg). This can be done on the board and the team with the longest chain after two minutes wins. Make it more difficult if the students can handle it by specifying a category. Alternatively, use a ball and play the game orally. A student from one team says the first word, then tosses the ball to a player on the other team who must give the next word. If a student can't think of a word or repeats one that has already been said, they are out of the game.

15. Geography quiz. Use any facts you know off the top of your head. (What is the capital city of... what is the currency of... which language is spoken in... what colours are on the flag of...)

16. Smartphone challenge. Challenge the learners to research specific items of vocabulary using their smartphones. For example, give a list of animals and learners must find the word for the baby animal (cat/kitten, horse/foal, bear/cub...), or a group of animals (sheep/flock, lion/pride, shoal/fish...). My students are usually excited to be allowed to use their phones in class for once. They can do this in groups and the first team to find all the words is the winner.


Grammar warmers and fillers

17. Verb forms revision. Students in small teams; each team has a small whiteboard, if available (paper if not). Call out a verb and students have to write the form that you specify (past simple, past participle...). The first team to write the correct form and hold up their whiteboard gets the point.

18. Present passive practice. Write up the structure "_____ is made from _____". Students in small groups have to make as many sentences as they can using that structure, but cannot use a word more than once. (Paper is made from wood, cheese is made from milk...) Set a time limit of about 3 minutes.

19. Grammar noughts and crosses. Draw a 3x3 grid on the board and write a word in each square. Students are in two teams. Decide which team goes first by coin toss or drawing straws. To take a square, the team must make a sentence with at least 10 words using the word in that square and the grammar structure you specify. If they cannot, it is the other team's turn.


Listening and pronunciation warmers and fillers

20. Minimal pairs race. Write up lots of minimal pairs in a random cloud on the board. For example ship/sheep, eyes/ice, my/might... Divide the class into two teams. Call out a word and one player from each team has to touch the word you said (or circle it with a pen if you prefer). The first to get the correct word wins a point.

21. Numbers race. Same as above but write up lots of numbers.

22. Shopping list memory game. Read out your shopping list with about 15 items. Students are not allowed to write while you talk. Then they make a list afterwards to see how many they can remember.

23. Running dictation. Divide students into pairs and stick a short reading text on the wall on the other side of the classroom. One student will be the runner and the other will be the writer.

24. Shouting dictation. If you don't have the space for a running dictation, have pairs standing or seated a few feet away from each other and one dictates to the other by shouting. Use different sections of text so that one student doesn't end up shouting for all the others.

Stop the tuk tuk!

My students were getting bored to death of "Stop the Bus" as my go-to filler so I decided to think of a variant. "Stop the Helicopter" worked fairly well for a short time, which was not in fact a different game, I just used parts of speech for the categories: eg. think of a noun, verb, adjective and adverb that begin with P.

The name change didn't fool them for long, so I promised I would write a new game called "Stop the Tuk Tuk" that was going to be completely different. And it isn't, but it caused so much hilarity that it's a shame not to share it.

This is all you write on the board:

STOP THE TUK TUK

I was going to the _________________

on/in my _____________________

when I hit a ______________________

Explain that the first line is a place, second line is a form of transport, and the third line is an object, animal, or anything you can hit with a vehicle. I demo this with T: "I was going to the temple in my tuk tuk when I hit a tree". Other letters that work logically are C (cinema, car, cat), H (hospital, helicopter, house) and M (museum, motorbike, monk*). I had exhausted all the logical letters but the students were still having fun, so we ended up producing the beautiful sentences "I was going to the zoo on my zebra when I hit a zombie" and "I was going to the kitchen on my kangaroo when I hit the king".

This is more fun than Stop the Bus because it creates a surreal mini-story rather than a dry list of unconnected words. I've never had a class of adults so gleeful. It also sneakily practises past continuous with past simple for interrupted actions.

Have you put your own spin on a traditional filler? I'd love to know about it!

*actual student's suggestion, not mine. I would never advocate joking about monks in this part of the world, or kings for that matter. But if the students come up with it of their own accord, who's to stop them?

Present perfect continuous: a no-prep mingle activity

When teaching a grammar point it's important to think "When do I actually use this structure in real life?". The present perfect continuous often appears in ESL textbooks in contrived contexts such as "Why are your eyes red? - I've been crying!"... which honestly I don't think I've ever said in my life.

Being in a new town and a new job, I've found myself having the same conversation over and over. Within a few minutes the conversation generally runs to "I work at the language school - Oh, how long have you been working there?"

Teaching this usage of the present perfect continuous prepares students to have a natural, normal, real-life conversation. What could be better?

Procedure

First, have each student take a small piece of paper and write the following items. Stress: not your own name and workplace but a made-up one.

Name Place of work Small number

Example:

Sopheak Hospital 3

Take the papers in, shuffle and redistribute. Model the conversation:

"Hello, what's your name?"

"My name's..."

"Where do you work?"

"I work at the..."

"How long have you been working there?"

"I've been working there for X years!"

Now the students mingle around the classroom to practice the questions and answers using the cues on their paper. To give a motivation for speaking to everyone, challenge them to find someone who works in the same place as them. Obviously this may or may not happen depending on what the students have written, but they will have to speak to everyone to find out!

Happy mingling!