Click for warm up suggestions for the start of your lessons
Print this warm up and maintenance section
Print this warm up and maintenance section
These activities can be done in the following order at the start of your lesson:
1. Welcoming
Greet the students by name as they enter the classroom and gesture for them to sit down. If you have space on the floor, it’s a good idea to have a cushion for each student as this makes sitting arrangements easy to [hide_on_uk]organize[/hide_on_uk][hide_on_us]organise[/hide_on_us]. Try and arrange the cushions beforehand spaced out in a fan-shape around you.
2. Name tags
Before class prepare some name tags (stickers or pin-on tags) with each student’s name written in lower case letters. Sit down with your students and lay out the name tags in front of you. Pick up each tag and call out the name. Try and encourage each student to put their hand up and say “yes”. Hand over the tags and help to pin / stick on. Later on as your students recognize their written names you can have each student in turn pick out their own name tag.
3. Greetings
Use a glove puppet (such as a Sesame Street puppet) to greet the students. Keep him in a cloth bag. Bring out the bag, open it enough to see in and shout into the bag the puppet’s name (e.g. “Cookie Monster!”). Then move your ear to the opening to listen – nothing. Go to each student and encourage them to shout the puppet’s name into the bag – each time nothing happens. Finally, get all the students together to shout the name at the same time. This time the puppet wakes up and jumps out of the bag! The puppet then chats to each student:
Puppet (teacher): Hello, What’s your name?
Student Hello. My name is….
Puppet: Goodbye / See you!
Student: Goodbye / See you!
As your students learn more phrases, you can include them in the conversation, such as “How old are you? Do you like …?, Can you …?, etc.
Finally, the puppet goes back into the bag and back to sleep.
4. Sing the “Hello song” or a review song
Sit in a circle and sing along to the song. Encourage students to clap along or pat their laps in time with the music. The Hello song is a good song to start the lesson with, especially as it has an accompanying Goodbye song to sing at the end of the lesson.
Lyrics for the “Hello song”
Hello, hello, Hello, hello,
How are you? How are you?
I’m fine, thank you, I’m fine, thank you,
We’re ok, We’re ok.
Lyrics for “The Hello Song”
Hello, hello,
How are you today?
Hello, hello,
How are you today?
I’m fine, thank you,
I’m fine, thank you,
I’m fine, thank you,
And how about you?
Hello, hello,
How are you today?
I’m fine, thank you,
And how about you?
Gestures for the “Hello song”
These are quite straight forward. First time you play the song do the gestures and encourage everyone to do them with you.
- Wave as you sing the “Hello, hello” parts.
- Gesture to others as you sing, “How are you today?”
- Point to yourself as you sing, “I’m fine, thank you”
- Hand gesture towards another student as you sing, “And how about you?”.
[hide_on_uk]Short sample (members get full-length song):
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[hide_on_us]Short sample (members get full-length song):
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Song download
Music only
Song video
Song posters
5. Read a classroom reader again
As you progress through the lessons you will start to build up a catalog of classroom readers. Kids love going back to old stories and reading through them again. Invite a student to pick a classroom reader and read through it as a class. Make the story as interactive as possible by asking questions (e.g. what [hide_on_uk]colors[/hide_on_uk][hide_on_us]colours[/hide_on_us] there are, the names of different objects, etc.) and getting students to speculate what is going to happen next in the story.
6. Homework check
Check each student’s homework set in the last lesson. Ask each student some questions about their homework worksheet (e.g. “what [hide_on_uk]color[/hide_on_uk][hide_on_us]colour[/hide_on_us] is it?”), give lots of praise, and then put some kind of mark on the homework sheet (e.g. a sticker, a stamp or draw a smiley face). Finally, tell your students to put their homework back into their bags.
7. Do “Exercise routine” activity
Say the following and have your students follow your lead: “Stand up (teacher stands and so does everyone else), “Hands up / hands down” (x 3-5), “Jump” (x3-5), “Run! / Stop!” (x3-5), “Turn around! / Stop!” (x3-5), finally “Sit down”.
Throughout the course you can introduce other commands, such as “Hop”, “Star Jump”, “Wiggle”, “Crouch” and so on.
Extra activity: Once your students have got to know these exercises you can play “Teacher says” using these actions.
How to play … Teacher says:
This is basically the game ‘Simon says’ but using the words “Teacher says” instead. The teacher tells the students to do an action and they do as asked (e.g. “Teacher says … jump 3 times”). The teacher keeps on giving instructions with different actions using “Teacher says …”. At some point the teacher gives a command without using the phrase “Teacher says” (e.g. “Hop 5 times”) and the students must not do that action – they have to stay still. Any students that do the action have to sit out for the rest of the game. The last student standing is the winner.
8. Name writing practice
If your students cannot write their names yet, this is a great activity. For really young ones, don’t worry if their effort is a scrawly mess – always encourage and praise.
You will need to prepare a writing sheet for each student before class with their name written in dots for them to practice tracing their names (also prepare one for yourself so you can model the task). You can either make these yourself (hand draw the dots for each name) or use a font typed into a Word document – we like to use the “National First Font Dotted” font (you can download it for free here: http://www.fontspace.com/roger-white/national-first-font-dotted).
Prepare the sheets something like this:
Tip:
Make a few extra copies of each student’s name writing sheet so you can use them in future lesson or for homework.
When everyone has finished writing their names, get each student to hold up their sheet so you and everyone can see. Give lots of praise to each student.
9. Review past lessons
Reviewing past lessons is very important – students need constant practice of new vocab, structures, songs, games and so on. Always review parts of your last lesson as well as some parts from other previous lessons. You can spend 5-10 minutes reviewing – it’s fine to recycle games and activities from your past lessons to review as kids enjoy playing familiar games (although be careful not to play a game to death!).
Note: You can also include review activities in the main body of your lesson. Kids can have short attention spans so it’s good to be able to pull out lots of activities during different stages of the lesson.
Other ideas to include in your warm up:
What’s in the bag?
This is a great activity to do at the beginning of your lessons. Fill a large cloth bag with items from your previous lessons (e.g. plastic fruit, animals, etc.). You can also throw in a few other objects (e.g. a pencil, a plastic bottle, a plastic cup – anything lying around (and safe!)). Show the bag to your students and shake it to rattle the objects inside. Pull out different objects, teach/elicit their names, have students hold and pass the objects around. You can even have students pull objects out of the bag. Pull out 1 or 2 objects per student. Finally, place the objects around the classroom and have each student retrieve each object as you call out its name and put it back in the bag.
Knock-knock
This can be used at the beginning of each class. Teach the students to knock on the door before entering the classroom. There are 2 variations for the next step:
- When the student knocks, teacher says, “Who’s there?”. The student replies, “It’s (Koji)” and then the teacher says, “Come in (Koji)”.
- When the student knocks the teacher must guess who it is, “Is that (Koji)?”. The student replies yes or no – if no, the teacher continues guessing. Having your students develop their own knocking styles makes this even more fun.
Spin the bottle
Sit students in a circle with a bottle in the middle. Teacher spins the bottle. When it stops spinning the student it is pointing at has to answer a question. If the answer is correct then that student can spin the bottle. For example, How are you? What’s your name? What is this? (show an object or flashcard) Do you like _?, etc.
Talk about the weather (do after you have taught the weather lesson plan).
- Prepare a weather board. Before the first class prepare a piece of cardboard and cover it with felt – you are going to pin this to the wall. If you can, try and get blue felt (to represent the sky). Write at the top in large letters, “How’s the weather today?”. Below the write “Today it’s”. Cut out weather pictures (such as our weather flashcards) and stick some velcro on the back. Arrange the weather pictures around the edge of the board and then put the board on the wall of your classroom. You can now use this weather board at the beginning of every lesson.
- Sing “The weather song”. Sing the song together doing all of the gestures.
- Look outside. Get everyone to look outside by saying, “How’s the weather? Look outside”. Elicit the weather for that day.
- Put the weather pictures on the weather board. Invite some students to come up and put the weather pictures on the board. Make sure these students say the word as they put the card on the board.
