The new school year is inevitably coming. This is the right time to prepare some activities that will help your young learners break some ice and get to know each other. Feel free to use these 3 activities, which are funny and will definitely help your students open up.
Animals’ noises – find your pair!
Prepare small cards with the names of animals. Remember they can’t be too easy to guess, so think of some more difficult ones (a mosquito and a whale rather than a dog or a cat). To make this exercise work, you must prepare two cards for every animal. Distribute them to your students. They can’t show the cards to each other at this stage. Their task is to walk around the classroom and find their pair. They can’t use their hands to demonstrate what this animal is. They must try to use only the sound. The funnier the animals, the better the outcome of this exercise will be!
Chinese whisper
An old, but still joyful game! Put chairs in a row. Tell the students to take a seat. Whisper one command to the student sitting at the end of the row. His/her task it to pass it on to the next student, sitting in front of him/her. The person at the beginning of the row is supposed to act out the command he/she heard. The rest of the team says if he/she heard the right command. Find some examples of such a funny command below:
Wash your feet
Touch the floor.
Eat a spider.
Sit on a beach.
Go to sleep.
…
Toilet paper
Tell your students to stand in a circle. Give them a roll of toilet paper. Then ask each of them to take as many pieces of it as they want. Don’t reveal the idea of the game now! The thing is that every young learner is supposed to say as many sentences about himself/herself as the number of segments she/he too. Great fun guaranteed!
Remember! The very first games aim to break the communication barrier between the students, make them get to know each other. The linguistic element is not that important at this stage. It’s all about being crazy and fun!
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All the above teaching ideas are taken from Teddy Eddie – a method of teaching English to the youngest.
Learn more about the Teddy Eddie method HERE
Visit our local websites: Teddy Eddie CZ and Teddy Eddie SK