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Warmers (with a Business English flavour)

Posted: March 4, 2015 in Activities

Tags: Business English., materials light, word games
13
Update. Thanks for visiting my blog! I was very happy to learn that this post was shortlisted for Teaching
English British Council blog award. If you decide to vote for it, let them know by liking the post on their
Facebook page: h p://ow.ly/ThG3m (h p://ow.ly/ThG3m).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Last Friday we met together with a group of colleagues at EPAM Systems (h ps://www.facebook.com
/epamlanguagetraining) to share some of the ice-breakers, warmers and games that we use. Here are
some of the warmers that we came up with. We teach in company, so many of the activities have a
Business English avour, but the great thing about these warmers is that they can be easily adapted to any
topic, no ma er whether you teach Business or General English.

Start with a picture

Display a picture and get the students to guess the topic

Do the same but reveal the picture gradually using h ps://tekhnologic.wordpress.com/2014/10/06/the-
big-reveal/ (h ps://tekhnologic.wordpress.com/2014/10/06/the-big-reveal/)
Find a clipart shape connected to the topic (Google topic + clipart). Heres a sample for Presenting:

Source: h p://www.oceclipart.com/oce_clipart_images
/boss_giving_a_presentation_at_an_oce_meeting_0521-1005-1219-0347.html
(h p://www.oceclipart.com/oce_clipart_images
/boss_giving_a_presentation_at_an_oce_meeting_0521-1005-1219-0347.html)
Once the students have looked at the picture and guessed the topic, elicit a few associations they have

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with the topic (this could be words, events from their personal lives). Ideally, share your own
non-obvious association and get the students to ask you a bit about it (mine is Germans, because my
rst ever important presentation was at a Russian-German student conference). After that, distribute
A4 copies of the clipart shape for each student and allow 2-3 minutes for the students to free-write
their associations inside the shape. After that, allow another 3-4 minutes for the students to share
their associations in small groups to compare, ask about surprising ones, and chat about them.
A great warmer suggested by my colleague Olga Lifshits was to google comic strips on the topic of the
lesson, distribute them and get the students to guess the topic.
If you teach a monolingual group, yet another idea for comic strips is to look for their translation into
your students L1 and get the students to translate the comic strip back into English, comparing with
the original.

Source: h p://projectcartoon.com/ (h p://projectcartoon.com/)

Source: h p://dilbert.com/ (h p://dilbert.com/)

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Yet another alternative is to display a few memes to get the students to discuss the topic see this post
(h ps://eltgeek.wordpress.com/2015/03/13/emf5-day-2-anastasia-fetisova-use-memes-they-said-itll-be-
fun-they-said-talk-summary/)for a summary of a talk by Anastasiya Fetisova on using memes in ELT.

(h ps://eltgeek.les.wordpress.com/2015/03/yyrqk.jpg)Tip: have some discussion prompts based on

the images ready!
In this activity (h p://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/blogs/katherine-bilsborough/katherine-bilsborough-
what-who-when-using-a-photo-practise-question?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&
utm_campaign=bc-teachingenglish) by Katherine Bilsborough, the teacher displays a picture and
provides ten answers about it. The students write their questions in pairs. Again, this activity can be
easily adapted to any topic. Heres a business-related example, e.g. for work-life balance:
(h ps://eltgeek.les.wordpress.com/2015/03
/the_hoya_oce.jpg)1. A report.
2. By Monday at the latest.
3. With her colleague Kate.
4. Because shes tired.
5. Not really.
6. Yes.
7. Saturday
8. Since 8 a.m.

Start with a sound

Have you ever led into the topic of a lesson with a sound? Heres an idea: google free sound eects
and choose a sound related to the topic (e.g. the sounds of nature for travel). Play the sound for a
minute and get the students to imagine where they are / jot down their associations / or guide them by
ask them questions, e.g. where is this? who do you imagine there? would you like to be in that place?,
etc then get them to share in pairs.
This is a sound le I found for travel: h ps (h ps://www.freesound.org/people/rodmuzik/sounds
/196627/)://www.freesound.org/people/rodmuzik/sounds/196627 (h ps://www.freesound.org/people
/rodmuzik/sounds/196627/)/ (h ps://www.freesound.org/people/rodmuzik/sounds/196627/) Maybe I
havent been on holiday a bit too long, but I really enjoyed listening to that audio and it really jogged
my imagination.

Start with a prop

For plans take out a few things youve got in your bag / share a todo list wri en in shorthand and
get the students to guess what youre planning to do.

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Play a guessing game

This warmer is my personal favourite.

On slips of paper write some words connected to the topic. Get the s/s to explain their words (either
working in pairs or in a mingling activity). Elicit the topic.
For instance, for Decision making, you could use disagree / discussion / problem / options / argument.

Start with a word cloud

Google an article connected with your topic. Copy the text and insert it into a word cloud maker
(h ps://tagul.com/). Display the text, for the learners to guess the topic and then to race to nd as many
words as possible connected to the topic in 60 seconds.

(h ps://eltgeek.les.wordpress.com/2015/03/cloud.png)

Brainstorm

This is an activity from Five minute activities (h p://www.cambridge.org/us/cambridgeenglish/catalog

/teacher-training-development-and-research/ve-minute-activities) by Penny Ur and Andrew Wright.
Tell the group the topic and get them to brainstorm ve or six phrases connected to the topic. After
them get them to choose the odd one out and justify why it doesnt t. Erase it from the board and
repeat until there is only one word.
Write cards with concepts/events connected with the topic (e.g., for Business travel, you could have
things to pack / things that might go wrong / benets of business travel over teleconferencing / places /
etc). S/s work in pairs: each turn one student draws a slip with the topic and rolls a dice to nd out
how many expressions connected with the topic they have to come up with. If you dont have dice, get
the students to roll online dice (h ps://www.random.org/dice/) using their mobile phones.
Get the group to brainstorm input/contexts to be used later in the lesson for language work.
Example 1: A pre-intermediate group studying will for spontaneous reactions in the context of travel.
At the beginning of the lesson I got them to brainstorm places where they can nd themselves while

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on a business trip.

(h ps://eltgeek.les.wordpress.com/2015/03/business-travel.png)
Halfway through the lesson the students used the spidergram to play a game: one student in each pair
(the boss) picked a location from the list, imagined they were having a problem there and complained
about it to the second student (an assistant); the second student replied with Dont worry, Ill +
solution.
Example 2: An upper-intermediate group studying conjunctions (provided, unless, etc). For a warmer,
they brainstormed hopes and worries that a recent graduate starting out in their company might have (e.g. I
hope Ill receive support from more experienced colleagues or I hope to earn a lot of money fast.) At some
point in the lesson the students returned to the list, responding to the worries using conditional
sentences (e.g. Yeah, your colleagues will help you a lot, provided you bring them cookies! or Thats
unlikely to happen unless you climb the career ladder very quickly.)

Start with a quote

This one is a classic: google an interesting quote related to the topic of the lesson and get the students to
discuss it. Some tweaks could be to:

Get the students to complete the quote individually or in pairs (e.g. for Teamwork, When you form a
team, why do you try to form a team? Because _______ ; Teamwork is so important that it is virtually
impossible for you to ________________). Board the students suggestions and get them to discuss them
in pairs/groups.
Find more than one quote, get the students to match beginnings with endings, then discuss which
quotes they agree with / choose one quote they disagree with and try and persuade someone else that
its wrong / randomly assign a quote to agree/disagree with to each pair and get them to brainstorm
arguments and life examples in favour/against.
It is about bringing out the ambitions of your
I love teamwork.
team.
If two men on the same job agree all the time, I love the idea of everyone rallying together to
then one is useless. help me win.
Leadership is not about your ambition. If they disagree all the time, both are useless.
As for the source of quotes, I personally quite like h p://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/
(h ps://vk.com/away.php?to=h p%3A%2F
%2Fwww.brainyquote.com%2Fquotes%2Fkeywords%2Fteamwork.html)

Personalize

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Another colleague suggested ge ing the students to write down 2-3 positive things going on in their
life (or 2-3 positive things in their life connected to the topic) and 2-3 negative things. Get them to
share in pairs / exchange tips. Works especially well as a lead-in to Problem solving.
If the topic is connected so some kind of event, e.g. presenting or job interviews, ask the students to
ll the gap in the sentence [Presenting] could be ____________ (e.g. time-consuming / important for
your career / stressful / a waste of time / a really nice experience / rewarding / ). After that, get the
students to share in small groups which of the kinds of experiences with [presenting] listed on the
board theyve had,- encourage them to ask follow-up questions, go into detail and chat! Alternatively,
play a guessing game: a student might describe an experience without saying which type of experience
he/she is talking about.

Get the students to talk

Print out discussion questions on A4 sheets and put them on the oor. Tell the learners that the sheets
are islands. Put on some music: while the music is playing, the learners simply walk around,
swimming, and as soon as it stops, they stop next to the nearest discussion question, and discuss it
with other learners who landed on the same island.
Another activity suggested during the workshop was to display 2-3 questions related to the topic, pair
the students up and get one person in each pair to talk about the questions and the other one listen
without commenting or taking notes. After that the person who was listening says So you said and
summarizes / retells what the rst person said.
One more option is to group the students in groups of 3-4 and get them to ask Have you ever
questions related to the topic of the lesson. The twist is that they are only allowed to answer yes
(alternatively, they might only be allowed to answer with a lie). They have to provide a justication for
their answer. E.g. on the topic of meetings, the students might ask Have you ever fallen asleep in a
meeting? and the person answering the question would have to say yes and explain why this
happened.
Another great warmer is Fortunately/Unfortunately. Start the class with a sentence, e.g. I was on
my way to a meeting with a new customer but unfortunately.. The students in the group take turns to
add one more sentence to the story, each time starting with fortunately or unfortunately.
True/False. This is probably something that every teacher has used at some point: get the students to
write 3 facts about themselves connected with the topic. Some of these facts should be true and some
should be false. Other students in the group need to guess which ones are false by asking follow-up
questions.

Start with an improvisation

Since writing this post, Ive discovered this great workshop on integrating improvisational theatre activities
in the business classroom by Christina Rebuet-Broadus. Some great short, creative, highly adaptable
warmers there please dont get put o by the improvisational theatre bit I think theyre great for
students who would never do theatre.

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Link: h ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLNAZ-uxiZM (h ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLNAZ-

uxiZM])

Make it S.M.A.R.T (h p://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria)

If you teach using a coursebook / printed materials, why not let the students look through the material
at the beginning of a unit/module and get them to set goals for themselves for the next two or three
weeks and share those goals with their group mates? You could support them by providing them with
some questions e.g.:
What do you already know about vocabulary / grammar /skills topics in this module? Do you nd these topics
easy or dicult? What would you like to learn?
What personal experiences related to these topics have you got?
In what situations might you use the material from this unit in the future?
What would you consider to be a good outcome by the end of this module?
How and how much are you planning to work outside class?

Acknowledgement. A big thank you goes to my colleagues at EPAM Systems (h p://www.epam.com

/company/oces-worldwide/russia.html): to Anna Zernova, who suggested the positive/negative
warmer, Olga Lifshits, who shared So you said and the idea to use comic strips, Evgenia Antonova and
Anastasiya Chernetskaya who remembered variations of the Truth or Lie game, Iryna
Piatrouskaya who demonstrated the Discussion island warmer in her workshop, and Adam Howell for
sharing Fortunately/Unfortunately.

We want more!
Have you used any other exible warmers that could be easily adapted to a range of topics? Please share!

Comments
Adi Rajan says:
March 5, 2015 at 1:10 am
Lovely, practical ideas.

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Reply
olyasergeeva says:
March 13, 2015 at 7:15 pm
Thank you, Adi! Ive been using a lot more varied warmers ever since doing that session. =)

Reply
sahan -wijenayake says:
March 5, 2015 at 2:38 am
(Y) Perfect

Reply
olyasergeeva says:
March 13, 2015 at 7:13 pm
Thanks! =)

Reply
carissa peck (@eslcarissa) says:
March 5, 2015 at 3:11 am
I like using simulations: h p://eslcarissa.blogspot.com/2014/04/simulations-in-classroom.html I cant
always think of one, but when I nd one it works great as an ice breaker.

Reply
olyasergeeva says:
March 13, 2015 at 7:13 pm
Hi Carissa, thanks a lot for the idea! I hope to get the chance to try it out soon.

Reply
Alex Chapman says:
March 5, 2015 at 6:46 am
will try them next Tuesday and Wednesday, they are good ideas

Reply
olyasergeeva says:
March 13, 2015 at 7:12 pm
Hi Alex, glad you liked them how did it go? Ive been trying out the Play a guessing game
warmer, worked very well.

Reply
Monika Mona Kisala says:
September 8, 2015 at 8:27 pm
Cool ideas well done and thanks for sharing

Reply
ann foreman says:
October 10, 2015 at 8:15 am
Hi Olya,

Just to let you know that weve shortlisted this blog post for this months TeachingEnglish blog award
and Ill be pu ing up a post about it on tomorrows TeachingEnglish Facebook page
h p://www.facebook.com/TeachingEnglish.BritishCouncil, if youd like to check there for likes and

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comments.

Best,
Ann

Reply
olyasergeeva says:
October 12, 2015 at 7:07 pm
Hi Ann,

Thanks a lot, this was a very pleasant surprise!

Olya

Reply
Ester says:
July 4, 2016 at 6:42 am
Hello Olya,
Thanks for sharing your ideas! Im a fan of warmers. I will adapt some of them to my students, for
sure.
I share my favourite ice breaker:
Start with a song:
Guess the topic, the type of music, some musical instruments, name some of the words you hear,
pictures you can see, rate the song from 1-10, etc.
Greetings from Alicante (Spain),
Ester

Reply
olyasergeeva says:
July 4, 2016 at 8:38 am
Hi Ester,
Thanks a lot for the idea, will try it out! Let me know how the other warmers worked for you!

Olya

Reply

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