This warmer/lesson filler gets students to focus on a topic and listen to their classmates.

The aim of the game is to find words that start with the last letter of the word said before. E.g. the teacher starts by saying classroom. The next student continues with morning, the next with garden, and so on.

Procedure

The rules are simple:

  • No word should be repeated (which forces the other students to pay attention to what is said by their classmates).
  • No proper names or abbreviations (like BBC) are allowed. Only English words are accepted.

The teacher can announce additional, more demanding, rules depending on the level, e.g. the words must have at least five letters or must be all adjectives, verbs, nouns or belong to a certain category like travel, food, house, school etc.

In a literature class a rule may be that all the words must deal with the novel, short story or drama being read at the moment.

Tip: You can also use this activity at the end of a lesson as a filler if there are a few minutes left to fill.

Topics