Talking about feelings

● Write a selection of adjectives relating to feelings on the board.

● Tell students to choose several adjectives (increase or decrease the number depending
on how long you want the activity to take). Tell them to think of a time when they felt
this way, and that they are going to tell their partner / small group about their
experience.
● Give students time to plan what they are going to say. They can make notes and ask
for vocabulary if they want to.
● Students tell their stories.
● Feedback to the class.

Find the question!

This activity is good for practising questions and for fluency practice on a range of topics.

Procedure:

● Write a list of questions (one per student in your class) relating to your chosen topic.
For example, if your topic is music, you could think of questions like: Who is your
favourite singer? What is your favourite music to dance to? What’s the best concert
 you have ever been to? Who is a singer / group you hate? etc. Adapt the questions to
the level of your class.
● Give each student a question. Tell students to write the answer to their question (not
the question itself) on a piece of paper or a sticky label. Tell them not to show anyone
their answer yet.
● Tell the class the topic (e.g. music). Give students 5 minutes with a partner to
brainstorm possible questions related to this topic.
● Now tell students to stand up and stick their label on their chest or hold their paper
with their answer in front of them. Students move around the room and ask each other
questions to try to discover the questions that the other students were originally asked.
● Encourage students to ask follow up questions and try to have a conversation. -What’s
the best concert you’ve ever been to? -Michael Jackson -When was the concert? -Why
was it good?
● Feedback and ask students what they found out.

Say it happily etc

Low level students can need quite a lot of drilling and reading out of dialogues, which can
quickly get boring and anyway they might have a negative impression of due to having done
it in their previous, unsuccessful attempts at language learning. One way to liven it up is to
ask them to do the same dialogue with different feeling in their voices such as “bored” and
“excited”. Their classmates can then guess which feeling they were trying to do and/ or
compete to make the most extreme version
Match the questions and answers pairwork
Matching questions and answers (“How are you?” “I’m fine, thank you”) is a tedious but
perhaps necessary exercise at this level, but one you can add some more interest and speaking
to. Give one student a worksheet with all the questions, and the other student a worksheet
with all the responses mixed up. Without showing their sheets to each other, they have to
match up the questions and answers by reading them out and agreeing which ones go
together. You can add a puzzle element and therefore some fun to this by the letters that
represent the responses making a word (e.g. (t)(a)(b)(l)(e)) when they are written in the same
order as the questions.

True/False Storytelling

Give each student a piece of paper with either the word “true” or “false.” Each student should

tell the class a story, and the class must guess whether the story is the truth, or a lie. To add to

the activity, you can allow the other students to question the student telling the story.
Paper Fight
Preparation:
Think of three or more questions (these can be taken from the small talk ice breaker

questions)

Sheets of paper, one for each student

Instructions:

Write the questions on the board.

Students must then write their answers on the pieces of paper.

Students then crumple the paper up into a ball and throw it at each other.

Let the fight continue as people pick up paper balls off the floor and throw them.

Yell stop and students must pick up a piece of paper and open it up.

Students then ask each other questions trying to find the owner of the paper.

Once they give the person their paper back, they can sit down.
Pictionary

● Before the class starts, prepare a bunch of words and put them in a bag.
● Split the class into teams of 2 and draw a line down the middle of the board.
● Give one team member from each team a pen and ask them to choose a word from
the bag.
● Tell the students to draw the word as a picture on the board and encourage their
team to guess the word.
● The first team to shout the correct answer gets a point.
● The student who has completed drawing should then nominate someone else to
draw for their team.
● Repeat this until all the words are gone - make sure you have enough words that
each student gets to draw at least once!
Word Jumble Race

● Write out a number of sentences, using different colors for each sentence. I
suggest having 3-5 sentences for each team.
● Cut up the sentences so you have a handful of words.
● Put each sentence into hats, cups or any objects you can find, keeping each
separate.
● Split your class into teams of 2, 3, or 4. You can have as many teams as you want
but remember to have enough sentences to go around.
● Teams must now put their sentences in the correct order.
● The winning team is the first team to have all sentences correctly ordered.

Connecting Words Game

Rearrange the desks or make space so that the students are sitting in a circle. You will start
the game by saying a word and then ask a student to form a new word which is connected to
the previous word, for example “lesson” and the next student can say “class” then “student”
and so on. This can be used for any new vocabulary that the class has just learned. To make it
more difficult, you can use a two-word phrase instead.You can hand out a penalty to any
student who fails to provide a new word and stops the flow. For example, the student has to
give a short summary of his/her hometown to the class. The summary should include the
following information: Where is it? How big is it? How many people are there? What is the
most famous thing in their hometown? What is the scenery like?

I Like People

1. Students sit on chairs in a circle, leaving a space in the circle for the teacher to stand.

2. First, they’re asked to listen to statements that the teacher makes and stand if it applies to
them, such as: “I like people who are wearing black shoes,” “I like people who have long
hair,” etc.

3. Next, the teacher asks standing students to change places with someone else who’s
standing.

4. Now it becomes a game. The teacher makes a statement, students referred to must stand
and quickly swap places. When the students move around, the teacher quickly sits in
someone’s spot, forcing them to become the teacher.

5. The students quickly get into the swing of this game. Generally they’ll quickly notice a
“cheating” classmate who hasn’t stood up when they should have, and they’ll also eagerly
encourage a shy student who finds himself standing in the gap with no ideas.

This game has no natural ending, so keep an eye on the mood of the students as they play.
They may start to run out of ideas, making the game lag. Quickly stand and place yourself
back into the teacher position and debrief (talk with them about how they felt about the
game).