On the Board: 200 Fast, Fun & Easy Warmer, Filler and Fast-Finisher Activities (Teacher Tools)

Students in the seats working, before the bell rings

On the Board is an easy, fun, no-prep way to start off your class! Get students into the habit of coming into class, looking at the board, and getting to work independently. While you're still setting things up, or even taking attendance, your students are hard at work.

This curated, classroom-tested collection of over 200 of proverbs, quotations, brain teasers, riddles, puzzles, and jokes is the easiest warmer activity in the world. They work as perfect do-nows because they are fun and engaging, simple enough that students can do them on their own. There are plenty of suggestions on how to use them in class and extend them into discussion activities or use them to introduce the theme of the lesson. Interpreting a proverb or solving a riddle is a great critical thinking activity and it's also fun!

And I've also shared nine other activity-types that you can adapt to start the class off with a review of the past class or a preview of the class topic. These activities also work as great do-nows because students can do them independently. And they can be extended to work as introductory activities as well.
This is one of my go-to teaching tools. I hope it'll be one of yours as well.

The senior editor at Alphabet Publishing, Walton Burns began teaching English in Vanuatu in the South Pacific. He has taught Russian oil executives, middle-school children, and Kazakh scholarship recipients. Burns began selling lesson plans and classroom activities in 2007. After placing third in the BESIG business lesson plan content and winning the monthly One Stop Lesson Share contest, he began working for the Nick Robinson Agency as well as independently. Since 2014, Burns has served on the leadership team of the Materials Writing Interest Section of the TESOL Association. He continues to publish his own lesson plans. His clients have included Oxford University Press, Macmillan, Pearson, Compass Publishing, 2LTI Testing, and New Horizons Language Schools. Besides his books with Alphabet Publishing, he is the author of Inside Writing Intro (OUP), Clue by Clue (Pro-Lingua), and a number of course books with Compass Publishing.