Video transcript - Need a no-prep filler activity? Try this instead of Hangman
We all need a few activities in our teacher toolkit for those times when your carefully planned activity finishes early (yup- I’ve been there, too…) and you’ve got 10 minutes to spare.
What you need is something that provides an authentic reason to communicate, livens things up and takes no preparation.
PLEASE don’t tell me that you play Hangman …. It’s my pet hate!
...and if you’re thinking ‘what’s wrong with Hangman?’, all I’ll say is, let me show you something more useful.
Hi, I’m Jo Gakonga from ELT-Training, and today I’ve got a fantastic little filler for you.
It’s called What’s better? and it’s very simple. There are two versions.
The first one is good at all levels and practises comparisons. You give your learners a short list of paired things, write them on the board and ask them to discuss in groups which is more useful and why. The twist is that the two things are completely unrelated.
For example, What’s more useful?:
A or B
A dog or a wooden spoon
A chair or a beach towel
A newspaper or a pair of walking boots
Go through an example with the class and elicit as many creative examples as you can- for example, a dog is more loyal than a wooden spoon, but it’s not much use for cooking.
Give them some time in pairs to discuss some reasons for what they think OR you could give them a letter each- A and B- and tell them that they have to argue for the item in their column.
Give them some time to get creative and get the best ideas out in class feedback at the end.
Here’s another activity that works in the same way and is great for higher levels. This one relies more on conditional use and it’s fun. For this one, you’re asking Which would you rather do?
You could put several of these up on the board at the same time or drip feed them in one by one by writing one at a time or broadcasting them to breakout rooms if you’re online.
You could have some quite reasonable ones like:
Would you rather work four long days or five shorter ones?
Some that seem possible like:
Would you rather eat pizza every day OR never eat pizza again?
And some that stretch the boundaries of possibility more- these are the most interesting, I think:
Would you rather be invisible at will OR be able to fly?
Would you rather live in a world where every animal can talk OR where every object can talk?
Would you rather fight 10 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck?
I hope that you and your learners have fun with these ideas. Let me know in the comment below how they go if you use them.
If you’d like more ideas like this, check out Communication Activities on my site. It has lots of low prep/ high output activities and it’s completely FREE. The link is above.
See you there
