Categories: Education

Class Warm Ups for English-as-a-Second-Language Students

An English-as-a-Second-Language, beginning-of-class warm up is a great way to start class and get students in an English-learning frame of mind. Many ESL students come to your classroom from an atmosphere where English is not spoken. If you are like me – teaching English to kids in a foreign country – oftentimes, the ESL students have not spoken English all day. Even if you are teaching ESL students in an English speaking country, many times they are coming from jobs or homes where English is not the dominant language, and they have been chatting with friends, customers and co-workers all day in their native language. A simple warm up gets ESL students brains in the correct place and turns on those English synapses. Making class easier for the ESL students and for the all important ESL teacher.

A warm up should be part of your everyday lesson plan and of course after your greeting is the first thing you do with your ESL students. It should be an easy exercise that all students can participate in. Participation of all students is important because this creates a fun focus on English in the classroom and gets the ESL students ready to listen to their teacher.

For elementary age ESL students I start my daily lesson plan with a verse of the ABC song. The kids really like it. The first verse is at a slow / regular pace and the second verse, same as the first, we sing much faster, like a speed round. I have a CD-ROM I use for this warm up, but you can also use the link to this website http://www.kleutertaal.nl/contents/media/flash/alphabetsong.swf. This website has a nice version of the ABC song and if you are lucky enough to have a modern computerized classroom there is beautiful a video that plays along with it. Or you can play piano or guitar.

For middle school, high school and adult ESL students I use a different simple warm up exercise. There are 4 variations on the same theme.

1 Write a letter on the board or computer projection screen, and ask the ESL students to call out words that begin with that letter. For example “D”: dog, dolphin, difficult, dad, don’t, drink, etc… Then the teacher writes these words on the board, review the list with your ESL students when you are finished.

2 Write a letter on the board or computer projection screen and ask the ESL students to call out words that end with that letter. For example “D”: word, and, find, could, mud, sand, etc… Then the teacher writes these words on the board, review the list with your ESL students when you are finished.

3 Write a number on the board or computer projection screen and ask the ESL students to call out words that have the specified number of letters in them. For example “7”: student, letters, English, Germany, without, etc… Then the teacher writes these words on the board, review the list with your ESL students when you are finished.

4 Write a word on the board or computer projection screen and have students call out a word that begins with the last letter of the 1^st word, then using the last letter of the 2^nd word, call out a new word. This is like the game Chain Spelling. For example: cat, tomato, open, nose, elephant, etc… Then the teacher writes these words on the board, review the list with your ESL students when you are finished.