Looking for some good warm up activities,simple and less than 6 mnutes, for JHS grades 7-9

10 comments

1. One round of scattergories is an easy one

2. Not to be a jerk, but this is why your dispatch company is taking a third of the money the BOE pays for you. Ask your head teacher/trainer for a list

3. Simon says

   Draw horrible pictures on the blackboard and get the students to guess what it is.

   Pass a piece of paper to all students. Tell them to write one fact about themselves. Collect papers, read off the fact, get the students to guess who it is (tell them each to write there names on the paper prior to re collecting)

   GL

4. Cross fire
   (It’s pretty much the most basic warm up so every kid will know how to play it)

   0. Put the target sentence on the board
   1. All the students stand up
   2. Student raises their hand (correct, they get to attack down or across ➕. All who are attacked get to sit down)
   3. If a student is already sitting and raises their hand they get to keep sitting but now they attack all the students in a circle around them ⭕️.

   If a student is already sitting, and they’re attacked, they have to stand back up. This makes it so there will be random students all over the class sitting and standing. And allowing students who are already sitting the chance to attack allows everyone to participate for the full warm up.

5. Wait, you’ve been here over three years and your best source for warm up activities is Reddit?

   Altopedia should serve you well. Just keep in mind the idea is not to find something perfect and use it, but to alter it to your needs and your students’ needs.

6. Are you team teaching with a JTE? Ask your JTE which sections of the textbook the students have covered so far.

   A Japanese teacher showed me a great warm-up he called Mistake Quiz. He used the textbook vocabulary for pair quizzes for 3-5 minutes on a timer.

   Students janken and the winner starts by quizzing their partner on textbook words. When the partner makes a mistake or passes, the quizzer tells the quiz answerer the correct word. Then they switch roles until the other makes a mistake. Pairs quiz until the timer ends.

   Another teacher taught me a great listening and vocab warm-up, Teacher Mistakes. Use a textbook page they already covered. Underline and substitute some adjectives, pronouns, or nouns on the page, one per line of text.

   Tell the students open to the textbook page, look, and listen carefully for your “mistakes”. Students raise their hands and correct you with the word in the text.

7. Give students a list of simple questions (they should be able to understand them, using variations of the same question is fine).

   Read and repeat the questions.

   Have students (individually or as a class) ask you.

   Put students in pairs and have them ask each other.

   If you have more time change the pairs and do it again.

   If you have more time have students write their answers.

8. Word counter. I have print with numbers 1 to 100 on it. I give the students a topic and put them into pairs. Then one of the students in the pair has to talk about the topic for a set amount of time (usually 1minute 30 seconds). The other student has to listen carefully and count the number of English words the speaking person says. The focus here is on giving one student time to test out the English they’ve learned while the other student practices active listening. If you want to extend it you can 2 two rounds for each student and tell them to say the same thing they said in the first round plus more.

9. Bingo sheets, with a question at the top, and a different answer in each box. Students go around asking others the question and marking off the answers until they hit 5 in a row. For example, What can you do? And in each box, some kind of ability. I can play piano. I can eat spicy food. To make it more challenging, make students stick to one answer, so they cant fudge their answers to help their friends win. The energy in the room always improves when I play this!

10. I used images of Bev Doolittle’s paintings and optical illusions on the projector. The language points were vocabulary which they looked up in their dictionaries to complete sentences – “I see a…”, “There are…” , “There is…”