Showing posts with label warmers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label warmers. Show all posts

Tuesday, 26 May 2009

My new favourite website

Could www.futilitycloset.com be one of the greatest websites of all time?
From a teacher's point of view it may well be. It's a compendium of weird of amusing anecdotes, fun linguistic facts and brainteasers, many of which would be brilliant for advanced English learners.
Here are a few of my favourites so far:

Puzzles:

Short texts:

And also:

Wednesday, 4 March 2009

Inspiring photographs

Intriguing, artistic, topical, and sometimes amusing pictures can be found on the websites of most news sources, for example:
These can be used for all kinds of warmers and fillers, for all levels:

Beginners:
  • Name as many things as you can in the picture.
  • How does the picture make you feel? (choose from a list of adjectives)
  • Guess the country / situation
Intermediate:
  • Tenses practice: What is happening? What has happened? What is going to happen?
  • Brainstorm adjectives to describe the picture.
Advanced:
  • Describe the picture to a partner so they can make a rough sketch (good for designers, marketing students)
  • Speculation modals: They might be doing... They must have been...
You can also get a lot of mileage out of the captions, from a straightforward "match the captions to the right picture", to a Call My Bluff type activity (give teams the real captions and get them to write two fake ones).