Planning a lesson is no easy task, especially if you're about to introduce a difficult topic. Sometimes, you need a little bit of something extra to really make your lesson flow. For this reason, ESL teachers usually use warmers and fillers. Warmers are used in lessons to ease the students into the topic you're going to present. Along the same lines, fillers are used to reinforce topics or follow up with extra practice for students. BusyTeacher.org has 363 warmer and filler worksheets to make your lesson run smoothly without skipping a beat.
The beauty of using warmers and fillers is that very little planning goes into using them. That’s great because it cuts your planning time by a lot, and also cuts out any awkward downtime in the classroom. These worksheets are helpful when it comes to grammar, vocabulary, writing, or even listening and speaking practice.
These warmer and filler worksheets can be used in several ways. Some can be used as discussion topics to get your students speaking. Some can be used to review grammar topics you have covered in the past. Another great warmer is a writing practice worksheet, which gives students sentences like “This morning I…” and students write down what they did that morning. There are endless possibilities to what you can do in your classroom with these worksheets.
Another great feature of these warmer/filler worksheets is that most can be used for all levels. However, if you need a worksheet for a specific level, the descriptions of all worksheets on BusyTeacher.org show the levels for which they're appropriate . You can even reuse them for your other classes of different levels. Not sure if a certain worksheet is right for your lesson? No problem! Just click on the thumbnail to preview the worksheet and see if it’s right for your class.
Don’t worry about registering or subscribing, since all worksheets on BusyTeacher.org are free to download, and there's no limit to how many you can download! You can use one or two of our worksheets for your lessons every day. All worksheets on BusyTeacher.org were created and submitted by fellow ESL teachers from all over the world. They've been used in classrooms, too - so rest assured that these worksheets are tried and true.
If you have some worksheets of your own that you've found useful in your lessons, why not share them with other ESL teachers to use in their lessons as well? Upload your worksheets to BusyTeacher.org by clicking the link at the bottom of this page titled “Submit a worksheet,” and join the hundreds of thousands of ESL teachers who already use BusyTeacher.org for their lesson planning needs.
Make BusyTeacher.org your number one online resource for worksheets by bookmarking us today. With 363 warmers and fillers, lesson planning will be a breeze. Get started by checking out our most popular warmers and fillers below.
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Write a list of different subjects on small cards or slips of paper (e.g. Tennis, computers, shopping for food, traffic, beer, suits and ties, cycling, babies).
Show a subject card to one ...
Groups of three, four or five.
SS think of a word then pretend they are the letters of the word. SS stand up in front of the class and mime the word. The rest of the class has to guess which wor ...
SS write down three wishes.
SS get up and mingle until they find someone with a matching (or similar) wish. Then they sit down in pairs and talk about it . Variation: Two bad experiences. The la ...
Put a S in the hot seat. The rest of the class (including the T) fire questions at the S to try and get him/her to say yes or no.
A demonstration by the T may help for a lower level class ( &lsqu ...
The teacher’s chair is the ‘Hot Seat’. Send a S outside the class to think up questions for his/her classmates. Give the rest of the class a pattern.
They must use this pattern ...
T reads out a list of words, and SS can join in by supplying a word once they’ve spotted (or think they have) the connection. Do you know? Carpet, train, never, rubbish, heavy, yellow, wea ...
Tell the SS that the wall with the whiteboard on it is North. Ask them what the opposite wall is. “South?”, fantastic, and this wall? “East”, and this? “West”. ...
Write an idiomatic expression (such as "It beats me." or "I'm fed up.") in big letters on the board.
Call on a few students to guess what it means before you tell them.
Write a number of adjectives, such as mysterious, happy, peaceful, sad, angry, and frustrated on the board.
Call out a color, and ask your students to tell you which adjective they associate with ...
An ice-breaker to allow students to know their teacher better by asking and answering questions about him/her. The idea is to ask students to write personal questions they would like to ask to and ...
Write a word on a slip of paper and show it to a student.
This student must whisper it to the second student. Then the second student must draw a picture of what he or she heard, and show it to t ...
Write "Tell me something I don't know." on the board, then ask students questions about things they know about and you don't, such as their lives, cultural background, interests, and work.
Write a common adjacency pair (Thank you./You're welcome OR I'm sorry./That's alright) on the board.
Ask students if they know of any expressions that could replace one of the ones you just wrote ...
Draw an island and make sentences about what would happen if they cut down the trees there. Make a bunch of cards and put into two boxes. In one of the boxes put conditions and in the other one ...
Write a number of adjectives, such as mysterious, happy, peaceful, sad, angry, and frustrated on the board.
Call out a color, and ask your students to tell you which adjective they associate with ...
Write your name on the board vertically, and add a suitable adjective that begins with each letter of your name.
The next step is to invite students to do the same.
Write down the names of about five very different people on the board (a small baby, a rude waiter in a restaurant, a fashion model, a stranger in a crowd, and a grandfather). Give students a comm ...
Review a phrase or sentence that you want students to remember, by holding a competition to see "Who can say it the loudest/the quietest/the quickest/the slowest/in the deepest voice/in the highes ...
Put students in pairs.
Tell them to converse, but to deliberately make one grammatical error over and over, stopping only when one student can spot the other's intentional error.
Put the students in small groups, and ask each group to plan a vacation for you.
They must plan where you will go, what you will do, who you will go with, and what you will buy.
When they are fi ...
Prepare several paper bags, each with a different scent inside (perfume, cinnamon, cheese), pass the bags around the class, and let students describe what they smell.
Purchase a postcard for each member of your class, writing his or her name in the name and address space.
Turn them picture side up on a table, have each student choose one (without looki ...
Provide each student with a list of the current top ten popular songs.
Play excerpts from some or all of the songs, and choose some questions to ask your students, such as: Did you like the song? ...
Produce a list of commonly used sentence-modifying adverbs on the board, such as suddenly, actually, unfortunately, and happily.
Then launch into a story, which each student must contribute to, w ...
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