British Council Warmers and Fillers. A booklet to learn and practice vocabulary and grammar in English

British Council Warmers and Fillers

Every teacher has a warmer or filler that they really like: as an organisation, we have lots, so we decided to share some with you. In this booklet you’ll find over 30 ideas for warmers and fillers, all of which have come from a British Council teacher or manager – every one of our teaching centres in Spain contributed, and we’d like to thank all of them for their efforts.

Of course, in the teaching world there’s no such thing as originality – we use ideas that spread by word of mouth, or we adapt and change ideas we’ve read about in books. Just to clarify, then, none of our staff claims authorship or ownership over any of these suggestions, and if you find them in other books, so much the better – if they’re popular, they must be valid. But we would like to apologise to anyone who has published any of these ideas before: we have not knowingly used commercially available materials, and we would have attributed all the activities to their originators if we could.

We haven’t ordered the activities in any way: we wouldn’t want you to look only in one ‘section’ of the booklet because you are, say, a teacher of adult English. It may be that by flicking through Primary and Secondary tasks, you find something that you can use, or at least adapt, to your own context. Be sure to experiment, and you’ll be sure to find your rewards. And what’s the difference between a warmer and a filler? Very often it’s in how we choose to use tasks:generally speaking, a warmer is something you do at the start of class to get learners switching from L1 habits into L2, while a filler is something you use to change pace, vary patterns of interaction, or use to usefully exploit 10 minutes at the end of class. So try them out, and don’t be afraid to ask your learners which ones they like.