(upbeat music)
- Hello Tefl students, in this quick video
I wanna go through three sample warm up activities with you.
Before I get into my first activity,
I wanna remind you of what Wayne said in his last video
about the importance and considering
the purpose behind a warm up activity.
The warm up activity should be simple, the low level,
hopefully an engaging activity
that triggers the students background knowledge
on language they already know
to help prepare them for the upcoming topic.
Let me first show you one of my favorite warm up activities.
It's a ranking task or a ranking activity.
One of the reasons that I enjoy ranking activities
is simply because they're relatively easy to design
and often give my students an opportunity
to express their own opinions regarding the content.
Up in the corner I've got an example for you
that I made yesterday, of perhaps a chapter
that deals with transportation.
If you look at the directions,
you have your students getting together
to give their opinion on different means of transportation.
In this case, my students are probably from Shanghai,
they need to know the information
in order to fill out their opinions.
And they have to work together in a collaborative fashion
to decide together whether they believe something
is good or weak and they market.
When I'm done with the activity,
I have them share their group's opinions with the class.
I'm gonna put up another example here in the corner,
that would be a different way to do it,
where students would be allowed to check their own opinion.
Partner A and partner B could put their own numbers
and then, in the end I can say
explain what your partner's opinion is,
why did you select that as being
a good or bad means of transportation
and they have to explain what their partner wrote
or perhaps why their partner wrote that.
This is a very simple example of using it for transportation
but as you can hopefully see,
it can be heavily modified to be used
for a variety of topics ranging from
food to environment, to whatever your topic might be.
And I have the categories of good and bad.
But the categories could also be interesting,
to uninteresting, to expensive, inexpensive.
The way that you rank the categories
is going to depend on the topic that you have.
So, with a little bit of creativity,
you can have a lot of varieties and ways
that you have your students do
a little simple ranking activity.
Activity two is a survey.
Surveys are very similar to ranking activities
in the sense that I haven't designed here
where students simply tick little boxes
rather than giving their opinion on something
they may be giving something such as information
about their family or past experiences that they've had.
In this case we have past experiences
with how they travel or how they transport
cause that deals with our chapter.
It's a very simple activity, and it does work to hopefully
trigger their background knowledge
on the upcoming topic on transportation.
Moving on to activity number three.
The third and final warmup task
that I want you to think about
is the idea of using pictures and images
to trigger your students background knowledge.
I love pictures because you can do
a lot of different things with them.
For example, I put two on the bottom here
that are actually from my own collection.
Here you have my husband and parents
catching a train in Chicago,
or you have kind of a busy city scene.
You could use an airport or bus stop,
because our topic is a transportation,
but I have some kind of pictures.
And with those pictures, I can do a variety of things
such as have them describe the picture to their partner,
I can have questions written on the board
that make them think about specific questions
related to those pictures,
or I can have them write down
or ask questions to me about the pictures.
They don't have to be your own personal pictures.
But in this case, I tried to make it a little bit personal.
One more picture example just for fun
would be this next one, which is me on an airplane
and I can tell the students, this is me
taking a trip three years ago.
Question number one, and I write on the board,
talk to your partner and think about
where do you think I am at on the planes?
Where am I at on the plane?
Question number two, how am I feeling,
why do you think that?
And question number three is,
where do you think I'm going and why?
So, these are just examples of different ways
that you can use pictures and they really do work well
to help get your students thinking about the topic
and hopefully giving vocabulary
that you're writing on the board,
it gets everybody mentally prepared for the upcoming topic.
So, those are three simple activities that you can use
in addition to what Wayne stated,
for getting your students ready for a lesson.
Thank you.
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