Ever felt a rising panic when you realised that your lesson wasn't going to last as long as it should? It happens to me a lot, either because I'm terribly poor at estimating the time required for an activity or I underestimate my students. If you too, are prone to situations like these, it's good to have a few fillers that do not require any preparation or materials and that you can pull off the top of your head. One of my favourites (which is also a hit among students) is the Vocabulary Snake or the Snake-word (
see detailed explanation here) which I picked up from the British Council BBC Teaching Website.
What I really like about this activity is the flexibility. I normally do it as a whole class activity. I tell the students that they have 5 mins to write as many words as they can on the board but there must be no repetition, and at the end of the 5 mins, we will see how many words there are and who wrote the best words. The students get to vote for their best or favourite word. You could probably offer a reward like a candy to the student who wrote the winning word. As it's, more often than not, used as a filler in my case, I wouldn't have any candies on me, so I'd leave it at that and end the class. On the other hand, you could also make it competitive by breaking the class into 2 teams and see which team comes up with the most or the best word(s).
Besides being a filler, it can also be used as a diagnosis activity to check how rich the students' vocabulary is, which was the original purpose of the
activity. Sometimes, you may chance upon a discovery that gives u ideas for follow up lessons. I made one such discovery yesterday.
I had been teaching this group of students for 10 weeks and had a pretty good idea of the vocabulary they were capable of, so I was pleasantly surprised when someone shouted out "grab! grab! g-r-a-b" to the friend whose turn it was, and so I made a mental note to compliment the class on that. A few turns later, someone else called out "tap" to the friend who at the board, but the girl wrote "tab". I instantly knew that "tab" wasn't the intended word because I saw the boy
tap his fingers on the table as he was yelling out the word to his friend. Besides, I didn't think they would've learnt "tab" at their level.
During feedback time, I congratulated the class on the number of words they had written and asked them to pick their favourite words or the words they felt were really good. When it was my turn to pick I told them I liked the word "grab". I then went on to elicit the meaning of the word from them. To my surprise, they stretched out their arms to the side, and while moving them up and down, started walking sideways! It took me about a moment to realise they were mimicking crabs. Then it hit me. The intended word was "crab" not "grab"! Needless to say, I had to set them straight. Of course, I also did the same with "tap/tab". For a 5-minute filler activity, I'd say that was quite an achievement. I guess a lesson on spelling and homophones is in order.
