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.
Create awesome-looking custom word searches in seconds!
Make A Word Scramble:
Instantly create custom word/sentence scrambles for your class!
Make A Double Puzzle:
Generate double puzzles your students will love - hours of fun!
ESL Articles
View our latest knowledgebase articles that will help you become a better English teacher. Learn from
professional teachers and put a bit of your own creativity into it!
Give out cookies, such as Oreos, to everyone. Tell them the class will fill the chalk board will material about the cookies. They will describe the cookies, analyze the quality of the cookies. dis ...
Before assigning a reading about a highly cultural American topic, such as stereotypes of the Old West and cowboys and Indians, show a clip from a related movie, a traditional “B” cowb ...
After students have read on a controversial topic, such the cultural and societal foundations of war, divide the class in half to debate the issue: you have news another country is planning to att ...
After students have come in having read on some academic topic like the sociocultural foundations of war, have them take a simple pop quiz.
Write one question on the board: for example, “A ...
Students do a free writing non-stop on a given topic for three minutes. When the teacher gives the topic they start the task. If nothing comes to their mind they continue writing the last word whe ...
Teachers can introduce this lesson by first discussing the word “dilemma” and its root and meaning: the beginning “di” suggests two, in this case, two choices, neither nece ...
After handing back students’ first drafts of essays, it’s time to discuss what they can do for the second draft. The teacher can ask students, “So all you need to do is fix the ...
Before giving out the first writing assignment in a composition class, brainstorm with students on the board the elements of “good writing,” what makes something well-written. Students ...
At the beginning of the class, write a target word from the reading on the board: it should be a key word, one important to the reading: for example, if the topic is the AIDS pandemic, a key word ...
After class discussion, have students draw a picture relating to one abstract concept from the reading. Some discussion might be necessary on the difference between “abstract” and &ldq ...
It is an activity that can be used at several levels, because all kinds of vocabulary can be used. The larger the room, the better the activity, as the word passes through several students before ...
After students have come in having read on a topic such as about the role of fathers in contemporary society, for example, have them spend a few minutes writing their ideas on the topic. It can be ...
Learning passive voice is necessary because so much of academic writing is composed in the passive form (note the prior clause, for example).
However, students often don’t understand the pa ...
Make a boring grammar review of verb tenses, for example, more interesting by personalizing it. After reviewing major verb tenses, such as simple present and present continuous, personalize it by ...
At the beginning of class, have students brainstorm and put on index cards key words related to their reading. If the topic is family structure, for example, key terms might be “nuclear fam ...
After studying a topic, like the cultural foundations of family, work with students to compose a haiku on the board. Give the rules of haiku: a poem of seventeen syllables and three lines (five s ...
To introduce the unreal or second conditional, the “If I were rich, I would buy a big house” construction, pass out the lyrics to “If I Were a Rich Man” from the musical &l ...
After reading on an academic topic, such as the history and spread of the AIDS pandemic, have students create a metaphor on the topic. Model this for them, perhaps drawing from the reading, and gi ...
After a class discussion and reading on a topic like public education in the U.S., have students write an animal fable that ends in a moral related to the topic. Show a model of an animal fable as ...
At the end of a course, have students write a letter to future students with advice for succeeding in the class. Go over language for advice as necessary: “You should—,” &ld ...
This activity occurs after students have read and given feedback on a peer’s essay. After the students have read and discussed what they liked and what they thought needed work on each othe ...
On days when students have writing due, such as a paragraph or an essay, have them exchange work with a peer. They are then asked to read and respond to their peers’ writing. The distinction ...
After watching a movie, take time the day after to introduce the concept of summarizing, which is actually a fairly complex skill. After the movie has been viewed, the teacher can ask, “How ...
On the first day of class, get students in small groups and hand out the course syllabus/outline along with about ten questions on critical points of the syllabus. Have students within their group ...
As a pre-reading activity, give students a short questionnaire based on the content of the reading and addressing common misconceptions in that reading. For example, if the topic of the reading is ...
2 4,858All
Got a great worksheet on
Warmers and Fillers?
Tell us about it and become a BusyTeacher contributor!
6,987