ESL Warm-Up Activities

Imagine a lesson that starts like this: students enter the classroom, take their seats, open their books, and start doing exercises. What kind of lesson would that be? Right, boring, exhausting, and unproductive. That is why it is a good idea to have an ESL warming-up activity implemented in every lesson. 

A warm-up is an activity that begins the lesson before getting down to the main topic of the class. Its aim is to warm up your students, prepare them for what will take place later, introduce new information in a relaxed way, or review some material from the previous lessons. 
The main idea of the ESL warming-up activity is to grab students’ attention, engage them, and set the mood for the learning process. It should help to forget for a while all the other things and problems that bother your students and get them into the right mode of thinking.

It is pretty simple to understand the difference between a warm-up and a lead-in whenever we get to some examples. If you are familiar with sports, you know that you have to warm your muscles before each training session so that you won’t get injured. 

Likewise, considering the fact that learning English as a second language means students don’t speak or think in it all the time, they will need some preparation. A warm-up does that, i.e., helps the brain shift into a needed English-speaking mode.

As for a lead-in, imagine you are talking about the latest news in fashion, and suddenly someone starts talking about sports. That could be pretty confusing, right? So, at this point, you will need a lead-in. Basically, it is an introduction activity before a new topic that is aimed at finding out the general knowledge your students have on this subject. 

Thus, this activity “leads the way” to a new topic and prepares students’ brains to perceive new information. It may also come up at the beginning of the lesson or any time you need to shift to another topic or activity. Still, it never precedes a warm-up.

Time and again, teachers omit this part of the lesson, considering ESL activities for warm-up are time-consuming and not important. But it is worth emphasizing that conducting a good warm-up exercise will give you a bunch of benefits and better results. Take a look at some of these:

• Learning environment: by providing a quick warmer, you automatically create a positive classroom environment and engage students to participate in the process.
• Memorizing: they say that to remember something, you have to repeat it many times. That is true, and a warm-up helps with it a lot; among other ways, you may use this activity to refresh students’ memories of previous material.
• Set the tone: warm-ups prepare students for the next stage of the lesson so that they can absorb new material much more quickly and efficiently.

• Open practice: warmers provide a low-pressure environment to practice the language; you will get the whole class involved and motivated, no matter how shy they are.
• New skills: with regular warm-up practice, your students will improve their receptive and expressive language skills;
• Creativity: warm-up activities are designed to be conducted mainly in an improvised manner; that is why they boost creativity and critical thinking immensely.
• Confidence: all of the above-mentioned benefits, by the nature of things, will promote your students’ confidence in using English.

Warm-up activities for kids

There are plenty of exercises that you can use as a warm-up. For younger students, the best examples of such would be “Simon Says,” “Hot Potato,” “Eye Spy,” “Spot the Difference,” as well as playing other dynamic games and singing songs. Here, we suggest you try the following ones:

This is a simple, quick, and fun warm-up. Ask your students to stand up. Say out loud a vocabulary word (this should be the one they know well from the previous topics). Now they have to spell it out and jump at the same time. 

This is a great activity to arouse curiosity and improve the sensory perception of younger learners. You can use it every time you teach new vocabulary words for different objects, like classroom or household items, animals, toys, shapes, fruits, vegetables, etc.

You will need to prepare beforehand and gather objects that you will put into a bag, for instance, classroom supplies: a pen, sticker, paper clip, marker, ruler, pencil, pencil sharpener, pencil case, rubber, etc.

This warm-up will force learners’ creativity, help them revise vocabulary, and improve team-building skills. Yet, it may be performed by any number of students.

Warm-up activities for teens and adults

Here you may come up with more complicated ideas and use such popular lexical games as “The missing word,” “Name 10,” “Odd one out,” “Jumbled words,” and others. Grammar review would also be a good idea, for instance, “Correct the mistake” or “Make a sentence.”

Or use some of these ideas:

Divide your class into groups or pairs. Ask them to write down as many facts as they know about bananas/France/space/pasta/hip-hop/Michael Jackson, etc. Give them 5 minutes to complete the task. Read all the facts with the class, and assign one point for each true sentence.

Prepare a list of criteria for this activity. For example:

• age
• alphabetical order of the name/surname
• number of friends/family members
• number of countries visited, etc.

Set a timer for 15-20 seconds and have students arrange themselves according to the conditions. Induce your students to use English only and enjoy the hecticness of the game.

It is a simple task that can be done at any time during the lesson—actually, whenever your students are tired or need a break. Just read a quote from a famous movie and let the class guess its name. This warm-up is great for practicing listening comprehension and target language skills. 

Prepare some abstract paintings, images, or inkblots for this warming activity. Show one of them to the class and ask, “What do you see in this picture?” Give students some time to think. Then ask them in turns to express their vision without correcting or interrupting them. Let your students feel free in their imagination and thoughts.

Such exercises will let you know more about your students, their personalities, peculiarities, and preferences. This will help you meet their needs and arrange more engaging lessons afterwards.

Come up with the main topic for this game, for example, “Sports.” Write it down in the center of the board. Brainstorm with the class some subtopics, like “Winter,” “Summer,” “Water,” “Air,” and so on. Put them on the board as well, around the main topic. 

Divide your students into groups, assign a subtopic for each, and ask them to choose a writer. This student will come up to the board and write the words when the time comes.

Set the timer for 2–3 minutes. During this time, the groups have to think of as many words for their subtopic as they can. The writer puts them on the board. When the time is up, count the correct words and give points. The group with the highest score wins.

Nearly every warm-up activity can be adapted to online learning. Moreover, there are lots of technological tools you can use to make your online lessons really enjoyable and motivating.

Here are some ESL warming-up ideas you can incorporate into your online teaching:

For kids

Online lessons with younger learners could be really challenging. Still, children are absolutely keen on interactive tools, so make good use of them to grab their attention. Pictures, songs, and animations will be the best options for warming your little students and setting the right mood for learning. 

If your little ones still have limited vocabulary, you may want to try this activity at the beginning of the online lesson. To prepare, you have to find various sounds (on YouTube or Spotify) that are made by different things or creatures. Your class should be able to name them in English (for instance, dog, airplane, phone, fire truck, etc.).

For teens and adults

With older students, you may want to try more interactive exercises and online platforms. Remember that the aim of warm-ups is to get their attention and set the right tone for the learning process, as well as to revise some material or prepare for the main stage of the lesson. 

This is the best activity to boost critical thinking and problem-solving skills for your students. Suggest to students that they explore the world with the online game GeoGuessr. This activity needs no preparation, but make sure all the players are signed up beforehand. 

With the help of street views on Google Maps, students will be placed in random places in the world. Their task is to analyze their surroundings and try to find out where they are. The closer they guess the correct location, the more points they get.

Such a fun warm-up will help you introduce lots of useful topics and concepts, like describing locations, modal verbs, directions, traveling language, etc.

For this activity, ask your students to grab a random thing on their left. While they are learning from their home or office, they may take a sock, a cup of coffee, a remote, a biscuit, or whatever. 

You may play some kind of charades at this point so that other students can guess the object. Or you may provide a scenario, such as life on a deserted island, and ask students to imagine how they would use their object to survive. 

While warm-ups are a great tool for setting the tone and engaging students, there are situations where it might be more effective to focus directly on the main lesson content. For instance:

Check out the link with lots of warm-up activities for different purposes for small classes.