What do you do when you don’t know what to do?

Imagine: you’ve got everything planned and prepped for your primary English class. Your slides are ready, bursting with activities to revise earlier learning and take you and the class through today’s lesson. The video listening from the online coursebook is cued up and you’ve found a perfect, interactive online game you can all play together at the end of the lesson.

That’s when the power cut happens.

Do you…?

a) panic and let them talk amongst themselves while you go out into the corridor and look helpfully over the technician’s shoulder, pointing at things you think might be called fuses and saying things like: “I think that one was in a different position last time I looked,” (be honest, you’ve never looked in that fuse box until today).

 Or…

b) move to the front of the class, smile, and say: “I’ve been looking forward to this moment.”

Top tip: it’s b), at least it will be once you’ve read this – because here are six activities you can pull out of your back pocket (when you have literally nothing in your back pocket) and use in your primary ELT class with no prep.

1. Mime a scene

Put students into groups of four or five and give them a scene to act out in silence and 5 to 10 minutes to prepare. Then have everyone sit down and ask groups in turn to act out their scene. The other students guess what scene they are creating. The scenes could be as easy as: you are all playing in the park, or as involved as: a surprise birthday party goes terribly wrong.

Extensions: Students set their own scenes to mine (writing them down beforehand). Students set other groups scenes to mime. Instead of acting out a scene, have them create the scene, but this time they must do so with no movement – a still.

 2. Picture dictation

You will need to give out A4 pieces of paper and coloured crayons for this. You take a piece of paper, put it on a book or a board so only you can see it, and draw a scene. As you do so, describe what you are doing.

“I’m drawing a winter forest … I think I’ll have one really big tree at the front of my picture…it’s so big you can only see the trunk, there aren’t any leaves or anything on this tree, but I will put one branch here, and … oh, yes, a bird is sitting on the branch. I’m going to colour that bird brown with a bit of red on its front…”

Your students hang on your every word as they try to recreate the picture that they can’t see on their own pieces of paper. The fun (and chance for real communication) comes when you decide it’s time for everyone to show their pictures and compare them all. They can repeat the exercise in groups of three, suggesting perhaps, a beach, a city scene, a museum, or anything else that pops into your head.

Note: if you are a terrible artist – do it anyway. There’s nothing better for language students than seeing their teacher doesn’t mind looking a bit silly in front of others.

 3. Create a story!

Elicit things most stories have, e.g. main character, villain, setting, genre, problem, action, solution. Write each one in a bubble in the board.

For each one, elicit examples and write them around the bubble.

Try to get students to stretch the examples as much as they can. For example, for Setting, you might get: on a pirate ship, Paris 200 years ago, the newly discovered planet Zobble, etc. For each suggested problem e.g., the ship is attacked by angry orca, try to get students to suggest a solution; the pirates make friends with the orca. The action might be by saving a baby orca from a fishing net.

Now ask your students to choose ideas from the board and write a one to two-page story, or create a cartoon with speech bubbles.

 4. Do you know who I am?

Students come to you individually and tell you what famous person they are going to pretend to be. (Make a secret list for any later disputes.)

Prepare to play:

Tell the class they are going to ask questions and find out who each other is pretending to be. Ask students to write 3 or 4 questions each. Ask students to read their questions out and you tell them if they can use the question or not. (Questions like “what’s your name?”, and “who are you?”  are banned in this game.)

• Put two chairs at the front of the class. * These are the hotseats.
• Choose two students to sit in the hotseats in front of the group.
• The class asks their questions. The students in the 2 hot seats take turns answering.
• The group tries to guess who their classmates are pretending to be. If they don’t guess correctly, the students in the hot seat reveal their identity. Change seats and repeat.

* You can also have more than one group playing at the same time, each with 2 hotseats.

 5.    Delivery service

Ask students to sit at desks (a horseshoe formation works best here). Check everybody knows everybody else’s name. (Double check you know everyone’s name.) Tell them they are going to start some conversations. They will write a question at the top of each piece of paper, then fold the piece of paper to close it and on the front, they will write:

TO: (the recipient’s name)

FROM (their own name)

Then they will call over the delivery person (you) and ask you to deliver their letter. You will take it to the correct person, who should open the letter, read it, write an answer AND a question to keep the conversation going. Then they call you back to deliver that letter.

Put 4-6 pieces of paper (half A4 size) in front of each student. Prepare to move around a lot.

This is a nice exercise in writing fluency because the communication is purely between the students. If you want to read the letters, do so after the lesson (but do tell them that in advance of starting.)

Tip: don’t give out the pieces of paper and pens/pencils until you have fully explained what they need to do.

6. Paper aeroplanes

This only works if you know how to make paper aeroplanes but it is a great listening exercise, as students really focus on what you tell them as you are making the model in front of them, and they make their own in lockstep with you. Stand at a desk at the front of the class, make sure students have paper and a desk. Make the aeroplane, explaining each step and tip as you do so. e.g. “use your fingernail to make this fold line really sharp…”

Once you have the aeroplanes, you can name them, colour them, go into the corridor/playground to try them out, measure distances flown (have fun).

Tip: it’s good to memorise how to make at least one paper craft, whether that be paper aeroplanes, fortune tellers, or a paper animal. Your future self will thank you when the tech stops working.

Bonus:  Guided visualisation.

I love this activity, as it involves listening, speaking, and putting our imaginations to work.

Ask students to sit with a partner and relax in their seats. Ask them to close their eyes or look at the ceiling. Say: “Imagine you are at the beach” *

Then ask students to answer your questions silently, in their minds.

“What can you hear?…What can you smell?… How do you feel?...Are you cold, warm, too hot?...Touch something there…pick it up if you can…What does it feel like?... Who is with you?...What are you going to do next?”

Take your time asking the questions, leave them time for their imagination to get to work.

When you feel the class is ready (or you have run out of questions), ask them to bring their minds back to the classroom, open their eyes and smile at their partner. Then ask them to tell their partner about what they imagined.

* Or:  at a fair / in a swimming pool / walking through a forest / in a huge city, etc.

Extension: you can ask students to draw or write about what they (or their partner) imagined.

These activities need no preparation and are fantastic in that they can often be repeated or extended. However, I’m not suggesting you only use this type of activity in class. As the amazing English teacher that you are, it’s important to be at the top of your game when it comes to using resources which have been designed and developed by experts. Your training in ICT and the time you spend crafting materials for class will be invaluable in guiding your students along their paths of learning. But isn’t it great to know that the most efficient, creative and frankly fun learning resources are your students’ minds? And they never switch off…