On the Board – 200 Fast, Fun & Easy Warmer, Filler and Fast-Finisher Activities
On the Board: 200 Fast, Fun and Easy Warmer, Filler and Fast-Finisher Activities is an easy, fun, no-prep way to start off your class! Get students into the habit of coming into class, looking at the board, and getting to work independently. While you’re still setting things up, or even taking attendance, your students are hard at work.
This curated, classroom-tested collection of over 200 proverbs, quotations, brain teasers, riddles, puzzles, and jokes is the easiest warmer activity. They work as perfect do-nows because they are fun and engaging, simple enough that students can do them on their own. There are plenty of suggestions on how to use them in class and extend them into discussion activities or use them to introduce the theme of the lesson. Interpreting a proverb or solving a riddle is a great critical thinking activity and it’s also fun! Looking for a fast-finisher activity? Make a handout with several riddles to give out when students finish a test.
And I’ve also shared nine other activity-types that you can adapt to start the class off with a review of the past class or a preview of the class topic. These activities also work as great do-nows because students can do them independently. And they can be extended to work as introductory activities as well.
On the Board is one of my go-to teaching tools. I hope it’ll be one of yours as well.
About Walton Burns (Fairfield County, Connecticut Author)
I am a teacher and materials writer from Connecticut. I fell in love with teaching English in the Peace Corps in Vanuatu, an island chain in the South Pacific which was the basis for Bali Ha’i in South Pacific. I had the most amazing class of Francophone Melanesian students who were working to complete their high school degrees. They inspired me and led me to love teaching.
Since then I’ve worked around the world and taught a diverse range of students from Russian oil executives who needed to improve their English for business, to Kazakh scholarship recipients off to study in American universities, to Afghani high school students on the FLEX exchange program and middle-school children taking an extra-curricular speaking class.
I began selling lesson plans and activities on my blog in 2007. There appeared to be an actual and growing demand for my work. So I began seeking out some small professional gigs, mostly helping fellow teachers develop lessons for their classes. My school began using me for more and more lesson plan development and editing. After winning a few lesson plan contests, I came to the attention of the Nick Robinson Agency and was very successful there. I continue to work with Nick and ELTJam, as well as independently.
I publish my own books and lesson plans, write for publishers, copy-edit, and design activities and lesson plans for language schools, including online lessons as well as face to face classes. Clients for writing and editing have included Oxford University Press, Macmillan, Pearson, Compass Publishing, 2LTI Testing and New Horizons Language Schools.
Since 2014, I have been part of the leadership team of the Materials Writing Interest Section of the TESOL Association, the international association for English language professionals.
