When you are only starting your teaching career, you need some good old activities to use. Nothing too complicated, nothing extra. Ideally, little preparation time involved.

Below you will find a list of activities I've been using for almost 10 years with all levels and almost all ages. Surprisingly, they never get old. Nice bonus: no cutting out required.

  1. What: Hot seat
    Why: Vocabulary revision, relative pronouns practice, speaking.
    How: A student is sitting on a chair back to the board. You write a word,phrase, idiom, collocation or what not that needs to be revised. The student listens to their group mates explaining the word and tries to guess.
    Lower levels: Leave scaffolding samples on the whiteboard like 'It's a + noun', 'We use it for + Ving' etc.
    Higher levels: Let them guess phrases, not just words. Put limitations: say, explaining the words using nouns only.

  2. What: Snowball
    Why: Memory training, drilling, controlled grammar practice.
    How: Draw 10-12 funny faces on the board. Let students name them, write the names down. Make a sentence about the first person on the board using target grammar, e.g. 'Yesterday Tim bought a new bike'. The next student repeats your phrase about Tim and makes a new one about the following drawing on the board.
    Lower levels: Mime for help, let students remind words to each other.
    Higher levels: Insist on longer sentences.

  3. What: True/False
    Why: grammar practice, ice-breaker, lateral thinking.
    How: Students write down some facts about their life and experience. 2-3 of the facts must be false but not too evident. Then they read out their sentences, the other students try to guess which facts are true and which are false.
    Lower levels: take a quick look at the sentences beforehands to correct some target language mistakes.
    Higher levels: Ask students to give reasons for their guess. For instance, 'That's false, Mary doesn’t have a cat. I’ve heard that she is allergic to cats'.

  4. What: Experts game
    Why: Question practice, speaking practice, drilling and use of target vocabulary.
    How: Prepare two sets of cards. The first set should include the fields one can be an expert in. Write something funny or unexpected like 'gardening', 'penguins', 'ufology' or 'fishing'. The other set will include target vocab. A student takes out the field card and you welcome the world greatest expert on fishing. Other students should ask any questions about fishing. Before answering every new question, the expert takes a vocabulary card with the word that must be used in the answer.
    Lower levels: Write something basic but funny on 'fields' cards, don’t go into creativity too much. You might opt for school subjects or common hobbies, for instance.
    Higher levels: The more original, the better. Egyptology, whales, American football are just fine! You can make the task more difficult by asking students to use indirect questions.

  5. What: Picture/scene description
    This activty was taken from Peeny Ur's workshop I've attended recently.
    Why: Vocabulary and grammar practice, drilling, exam preparation.
    How: Ideally, students work in teams of three people and more. One person is a secretary. You show a picture and ask them to make as many sentences about it as they can in 2 minutes. The secretary listens and marks every sentence with a tick on a piece of paper. When time is over, teams count the ticks. Next, you show them another picture and ask to do just the same thing, but this time they should produce more sentences than before. If you don’t have any pictures, you can use the classroom or let students describe what they can see out of the window.
    Lower levels: Give more time, provide scaffolding with a sentence frame on the board, like 'There is a…in the picture', 'There are...in the picture'.
    Higher levels: Time limit can be shorter. Also, you can ask the secretary to tick only the sentences that do not repeat the previous structures. So, if the first one was 'There is a man reading his newspaper', 'there is/there are' is not allowed anymore.

Feel free to share your favourite one-size-fits-all activities and - happy teaching!