Никоненко Тамара Петрівна

Information compiled from www.onestopenglish.com by Patricia Lozoya

These warmers use a picture or pictures to start the lesson

What do you see?

   Bring a picture of something related to the topic of the lesson (for example a picture of a classroom full of students). Show it to the students for five seconds and ask them to describe it to each other afterwards. Feedback on what they saw. Then begin your lesson.

Same but different pictures

   Bring in a series of pictures all related to the topic of your lesson. Give each student a picture. They must circulate and describe what is on their picture to others in the class without showing their picture. When everyone has shown each other their pictures ask them to sit down again and tell you what they remember. Ask them what all the pictures have in common.

Into focus

   This warmer works best if you have an overhead projector. Make a copy of a picture related to your topic onto a transparency. Project the image onto the wall or board but make it very much out of focus. Ask students to speculate on what the picture is. Bring it slowly into focus, pausing from time to time and asking students if they have any more speculations.

Collaborative picture dictation

   Begin a drawing on the board of something related to your topic, e.g. A teacher. Ask individual students to come up and add things to the picture (desks, students, a window, the teacher is writing on the board…) until you build up a complete picture of something related to the topic of your class.

You might find these pages of interest:

Using Pictures from Magazines from the Internet Tesol Journal: http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Werff-Pictures.html
Need pictures? Try using the Google Image Search: http://images.google.com/
Fun with pictures in the ELT Newsletter: http://www.eltnewsletter.com/back/June2000/art172000.shtml

 A PICTURE SPEAKS A THOUSAND WORDS by Jess Poole

   This warmer can be used with pre-intermediate students however it is better with students at intermediate level or above as they have a wider range of vocabulary with which to describe the pictures.

MATERIALS: a range of postcards/pictures of works of art. Some blue-tack. The more varied the pictures the better – include some very modern pieces, some classical, some cartoons and some photographs. Stick the pictures up around the room lettered or numbered differently.

In pairs the students walk around the room and rank the pictures according to their favorite and least favorite. They should discuss with their partner why they like or dislike a painting and they should agree on the ranking of the picture. This activity can be used to practice adjectives – you could give students adjectives that they then have to apply appropriately to the pictures. At the end of the activity, students give feedback to the class about their favorite and least favorite picture. You can do a class results table if you like.

If students do not have enough language for this you could give them titles/ dates/ country of origins of the paintings and they have to guess which one matches up with each picture.

Follow on

Another activity that can be a follow-on or a lead-in for a creative writing session is to give each student a different letter corresponding to the pictures on the wall. Students then write a short description of their picture and hand the writing back to the teacher. The teacher hands out the descriptions to different students and the students have to guess which picture the description corresponds to.

This can then lead to the students writing a piece of creative writing inspired by the picture.

When I have done this activity with students the best reactions and most interest have been generated by abstract art , art from the same countries as students and also paintings of the town/city where the students’ school is.

Cannibalizing Warmers: art gallery, sounds like good advice, dictating labels

Sent in by Hall Houston

   Cannibalizing is an idea that comes from The Recipe Book, an excellent Pilgrims resource book edited by Seth Linstromberg. In the first section of the book, Tessa Woodward suggests cannibalizing language learning exercises. By this she means taking parts of different activities and switching them around to create new activities. These three warmers were created using this idea on some familiar language learning activities.

Art Gallery
Materials: blackboard, lots of chalk/pens of different colors, 4 erasers
Time: 10 – 15 minutes

• Draw 4 large rectangles on the board, giving each one a “frame”.
• Call on one student to come to the board, and tell him he has 60 seconds to draw a picture of your head in the first frame. Time him, and make sure he stops after 60 seconds. Then ask him to choose another student to draw a picture of him in the second frame in only 30 seconds. Then this second student gets a third student to draw her, 15 seconds.
  Then, finally, the third student finds a fourth student to draw him in 5 seconds. Have all four students sit.
• Now, call on 4 different students to come to the board and stand in front of the four pictures, keeping their hands at their sides. Tell them that they can draw or erase any part of the picture in front of them but
  they will only have 5 seconds. Tell them “GO!” When the 5 seconds are up, you will shout “STOP!” and each student must move to the right, and the student at the right end, must move to the left side of the line.
  Repeat about 9-10 times, then have everyone sit down.
• And, finally, get everyone up to the front of the board. Tell them they are at an opening night of an art gallery. They should walk around, mingle, and discuss the works of art in the gallery.

Using your photographs in lessons by Saul Pope

Level: Good Pre-Intermediate Upwards
Age: Teenagers-Adults
Time: 20-30 Minutes

For this activity, you need to bring in about five of your personal photographs to the lesson. The photos should be from different countries and contain plenty of detail, including at least one building.

   Split the class into groups of 2-3 and ask each group to choose a photo to work with. Once they have chosen, explain the task. The situation is that you are all managers in a large firm (for adults) or planning a summer language camp (for teenagers), and the building in the photograph is a possible location for a new office/camp.

   The students must discuss (in English!) the good and bad points of their location in groups, before a ‘meeting’ is called after five minutes or so at which they will present their ideas.

   At the meeting take on the role of Company/Camp Director and get the most out of the presentations – ask plenty of questions about what they are saying, make students use their imagination as much as possible and make them laugh by playing the ultra-serious Director! At the end of the presentations everyone votes for their favorite location (but not their own).

Follow up activities include the following:

• Get students to write an advertisement for a summer camp based on the pictures. This could be done for homework (with a few extra pictures) and the results could be displayed on the classroom wall.
• Talk a little about the photos. Ask if anyone can guess where the places are, if anyone has visited them, and give a short talk/question and answer session. Ask the students which places look most interesting to them.
• Use the photos for description vocabulary. At a very low level this would just be describing what can be seen (boat, tree, hotel etc.), but for a higher level would include plenty of description (a scorching day, rocky mountains etc.). This could be made into a short game, and one that works well with children, in the following way: each student is given a photo which isn’t shown to anyone else. He/she writes five words to describe the photo on a piece of paper. The papers are given to the teacher and the photos are mixed in with some others and spread out on a desk. The teacher then reads the brief descriptions and students try to guess which photo is being referred to (tell them not to identify their own description though!).