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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Print phrases such as "in the library" "at an elegant dinner with the Royal Family" "in a noisy bar" "in a dangerous neigborhood" on separate strips of paper, put them in envelopes, and tape them ...
Prepare colored letters of the alphabet on cardboard squares and put them in a bag.
Students must draw a letter from the bag, and work together to create a sentence on the board. Each student mus ...
Time:
depending on class size and amount of paper taken
Level:
All (except complete beginners)
Focus:
Sharing personal information.
Materials:
One roll of toilet pap ...
I find that students at lower levels get bogged down with narratives: they either try to be too imaginative and the grammar goes haywire, or they get all the tenses right but have added no descrip ...
Divide the group in small teams, give a piece of paper to each team, the warmer is called "The longest tail is the winner".
So, ask your students to cut the paper (without using scissors/just wit ...
1. Ask a student 'What was the first thing you did this morning?'
2. When he/she has answered, you can go on asking the same question, or even better, make little variations like 'What wa ...
T dictates half a sentence, SS complete by themselves and read out at the end.
As soon as she walked into the room…..
I’m having a lot of trouble deciding….
One Satu ...
'How Was Your Weekend?'
Boring when it’s asked every Monday, but give SS the identity of a famous person on a slip of paper (or let them think of their own).
In pairs SS ask questions and ...
Split the class in to two groups.
Write up four columns with A, B, C, D on either side of the board.
Call out a topic like Country, Food, Animal, etc. Get them to run to the board and write up a ...
All you need is toilet paper. Firstly you tear off some squares of toilet paper by yourself.
Then you offer to do the same to your students WITHOUT ANY EXPLANATIONS! When everybody has toilet pap ...
Hang up four different posters (example - one of a world map, one of a famous singer, one of a flower, and one of Einstein) in the four corners of your room.
Tell students to choose one corner to ...
Hand a student a ball of yellow yarn.
Have him toss it to another student, while saying something positive about that student and holding onto the end of the yarn.
Continue in this manner until ...
Give each student a piece of chalk/pen and tell them to fill the board with pop song lyrics.
Then put them in pairs, and get them to use the words on the board to create a new dialogue.
First, instruct your students to write on a slip of paper the name of one book, CD, or movie that changed them in some way.
Collect the papers, call out the titles, and ask the class if they can ...
Copy a page from a comic book, white out the dialogue, make copies for your class, and have them supply utterances for the characters.
To complicate it for your students, you can ask them to 'hav ...
Draw a pancake-shape on the board, and announce that the school will soon be moving to a desert island.
Invite students one by one to go to the board and draw one thing they would like to have on ...
Draw a map of your country or another country that your students know well.
By drawing lines, show students where you went on a trip, and tell them about it.
Then call on several students to do ...
Copy some interesting pictures of people from magazine ads.
Give a picture to each student, have the student fold up the bottom of the picture about half an inch, and write something the person m ...
Copy pages from various ESL textbooks (at an appropriate level for your students), put them on the walls, and have students wander around the classroom and learn a new phrase.
Then have them teac ...
Collaborate with your students on a list of famous people, including movie stars, politicians, athletes, and artists.
Have every student choose a famous person, and put them in pairs to interview ...
Choose one topic (food, sports) and elicit a list of examples (food - chicken, pudding, rice).
Then have your student come up with the most unusual combinations of items from that list (chocol ...
Bring a fork, knife, spoon, bowl, plate and chopsticks (if you have them) to class, and mime eating some different dishes, letting students guess what they are.
Then let your students take a turn.
Bring a cellular phone (real or toy) to class, and pretend to receive calls throughout the class.
As the students can only hear one side of the conversation, they must guess who is calling you an ...
Begin by telling your students about an internal struggle between two sides of your personality (bold side vs. timid side OR hardworking side vs. lazy side), providing a brief example of what each ...
At the end of class, erase the board and challenge students to recall everything you wrote on the board during the class period.
Write the expressions on the board once again as your students cal ...
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