On the board draw a box and next to the box give a clue ‘It is black’. Get students to ask what is in the box, hopefully eliciting ‘Is there…?/Are there…?’ (E.g. ‘Is there a dog in the box?’ and ‘Are there sweets in the box?’). When they give up tell them: ‘No, it’s a TV!’ Pre-teach vocabulary and revise prepositions ‘in, on, under, next to, in front of, behind’ (you can do this by...

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Choose four pictures to draw on the board to portray the forms. For example you could draw an apple to demonstrate it's an apple; a pear to show it's a pear and rice to show it's rice (i.e. uncountable). Draw a simple grid on the board with different food and arrows going to different squares on the grid. You will also need some actions such as 'go back one step' or 'go forward two spaces'....

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This is a great intro warmer with a new class. Draw a star with 8 points on the board. Then write 8 things about you, could be where you're from, hobbies, interests, number of socks you wearing, type of food you last threw up, that type of thing. The students have to ask you questions about what you've written. Once you've ticked off all the points it's over to them. With a small group they...

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Split the class into two teams of equal numbers and get them to line up in rows. Show each student in turn a flashcard. The student that is shown the card must say what is on the card. If the student can correctly identify what is on the card, they can remain standing. If they get this incorrect they have to sit down. The winning team is the team which has the most members standing...

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This is a great activity that you can use with large classes with limited resources. Start by writing a word on the board. Get your students to say the first word that comes into their head that is associated with the word. You can go around the class until all the students have said a word. If a student can’t think of an associated word, you can use this as an opportunity to recap the...

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Jaws is a variation of "Hangman". A man walking down the steps into the sea only to find a shark waiting to snap him up! For every letter the students get wrong, the man goes further into the jaws of the shark.

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Give each student a card with the name of a famous person on it (or get them to choose themselves). Use people the students will be famiiar with, for example: David Beckham, Mother Theresa, Robbie Williams, Barack Obama or people who are well known in their own country. The students must not reveal who the famous person is. Students, in pairs or in a milling activity, ask each other questions so that they can work...

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Having a ball in the class leads to endless games! The teacher can do a quick quiz while throwing the ball. You can give a topic and students throw to each other and say related vocabulary to the topic when they catch the ball. Students can ask/answer questions when they throw/catch the ball to each other. Also, another game is when the word must start with a letter which is the same as the last...

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Put students into groups of three and instruct them to discuss, with each other, something that happened to them in the past. Get the students to pick one event to focus on out of the three (i.e. one persons past experience). Taking turns, the students tell the same story, each of them in as "convincong" a way as possible. The rest of the class have to guess which person in each group is telling the...

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Have students get into teams of 4-10 and choose a team captain. Make an 'arena' in the middle of the class for two students to face off. The captain of each team plays rock, paper, scissors or rolls a dice. The winner says a word and the opponent tries to write the word correctly. If they get it right, their team gets a point. If they get it wrong, the person who said the word...

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