A Quick ESL Warm-Up Activity: A to Z Game | Try out this TEFL Alphabet Vocabulary Game

If you’re looking for a fun, Quick ESL Warm-Up Activity that you can use with your English learners, then this A to Z game is one of our favourites. This TEFL alphabet game is a nice way to review vocabulary from previous lessons or to do help students activate prior knowledge about a topic. It’s simple, requires nothing in the way of materials and also doesn’t require anything in the way of preparation. If you’re a teacher, I’m sure you’ll want to have a few games like this alphabet one in your back pocket! ------- Try out another quick warm-up activity for ESL https://youtu.be/80vtLosY1JA • TEACHING ENGLISH YOUNG LEARNERS HOW TO MAKE LESSONS FUN by:    https://youtu.be/beyFVkEzKPc ------ Learn more about the ESL alphabet game: https://www.eslactivity.org/a-to-z-game/ Want to find more warm-up games for teaching ESL besides this A-Z warmer? Check out: https://amzn.to/3rbuiT2 https://www.facebook.com/eslspeaking https://www.pinterest.ca/eslspeaking/ https://www.instagram.com/jackie.bolen/ https://www.tiktok.com/@englishwithjackie #esl #eslactivities #teachingenglishwithjackie ------------------------------------------------------- More ESL Warm-Ups: https://eslspeaking.org/top-5-esl-warm-up-activities/ -------------------------------------------------------- Timestamp for this Quick ESL Warm-Up Activity: 0:00 Intro 0:11 When to use this warmup activity 0:45 How to play this activity 1:37 How students can win at this game 1:44 How to challenge your students with this activity 2:21 Check out my book "39 ESL warm-ups" for more warm-up activities! Transcript for the A-Z ESL Game: Today I'm going to talk about a very quick ESL warm-up activity called the a to z alphabet game. I'll generally use this as a warm-up activity if I think that students have already studied the topic before, so for example, jobs or animals. Unless students are like absolute, absolute beginners they probably already know a lot of animals, a lot of like clothes vocabulary, or a lot of jobs, those kind of basic things that are in all the ESL textbooks. So this activity is a nice way to help students activate their prior knowledge before adding on new things. It kind of just helps them make connections in their brain and make the new words more memorable. I put students into groups of two or three and then on a piece of paper I have them write the alphabet, so like a, b, c, d, down to z. Then I give students a topic, for example, animals and then I give them a time limit so one or two minutes is usually good. Maybe one minute is actually a little bit short, probably like two minutes to three minutes and then students have to write down as many animals as possible. For each letter, they only need to think of one that starts with that letter. They can't have, for example, ant and armadillo. They can only choose one: armadillo and then if they can't think of a B, they can skip to C: cat. They can go to fish or tiger. I don't require them to do it in strictly alphabetical order. They can just kind of jump around on the list wherever they want and then at the end of two minutes I get students to count up how many words they have. The winner is the group that has the most words. If you want to kind of increase the difficulty of this and push students, the more advanced students, to come up with more interesting words and you have a small class where it's easy enough to check, I get students to say their words, group by group. If any of the words are the same, they don't count so students have to think of unique words for each letter. Instead of just writing like ant, they'll maybe think of armadillo or instead of just like that. Maybe they can think of a bobcat or something more interesting that they already know. Tags: Quick ESL Warm-Up Activity, esl alphabet, esl activities, vocabulary warmup, warm up game, esl alphabet games, esl letters, teaching esl, teachers, teaching activities, English, esl games, Classroom games, ESL adults, ESL kids, TEFL classroom, TEFL game, quick games, quick esl, teaching tips, quick teaching, alphabet, alphabet games, How to teach English