ESL Warm-Up and Speaking Activities for Online English Classes
Twenty-one activities that work on a shared screen, sorted by what they are for: eight warm-ups, eight speaking tasks for one-to-one lessons, and five for small groups. Each one says the level, the minutes, and how it runs when the student is on a camera rather than in a room.
No printingLevels and timings givenKids, teens and adults
What makes a good warm-up for an online ESL class?
A good warm-up gets the student talking within the first minute and brings back the language from last lesson before anything new arrives. It takes three to five minutes, and it ends before it becomes the lesson.
The mistake is treating the warm-up as a game to make the class fun. A warm-up is retrieval practice with a friendly face. If the student does not say anything from last week during it, last week is already fading, and no amount of fun in the next forty minutes fixes that.
Online, one more rule: the student should have to do something visible on the shared screen, say a word you type, point at a picture, pick an option, within the first thirty seconds. A student who starts the class watching finishes it watching.
Which warm-up activities work for English class online?
These eight cover every level and age, and none of them needs anything printed. The level is a guide, not a rule: most of them scale by changing what you ask for, not what you show.
Three from last time
Ask for three words or phrases from the last lesson and type them on the screen as the student says them. Then ask for one sentence using any of the three. Retrieval before new input is the single most useful minute of the class, and it tells you in thirty seconds whether last week landed.
One picture, two questions
Share one photo. Beginners name what they can see. Higher levels answer “what happened just before this?” and “what happens next?”. The same image serves every level, so keep a folder of twenty and stop hunting.
Feeling, then why
Show six feeling faces. The child points to one and says “I am sleepy”, then, at higher levels, “because I went to bed late”. Kids will pick the same face for a month; that is fine, the language still changes.
Would you rather
Two options tied to the lesson topic, a choice, and one reason. “Would you rather work from home or in an office?” before a lesson on jobs. Insist on the reason, because the choice alone is one word.
Category race against a timer
“Name five things in a kitchen” with a sixty-second timer on screen. Beginners get one category and five words; advanced students get a harder category and a full sentence for each. The timer does the motivating so you do not have to.
Two truths and a lie
The student gives three sentences about their week; you guess the lie, then swap. It forces past tense in a way no drill does, and the guessing is the listening practice.
Show me, point to
“Show me something red. Point to your elbow. Touch the door.” The child moves, which is the point: a four-year-old who has been sitting since the camera came on has nothing left for the lesson.
Question of the day
One open question on screen, sixty seconds to answer, no interruption. Note one error to come back to at the end. Adults especially want the uninterrupted minute; correcting during it teaches them to say less.
Which ESL speaking activities work one to one?
One-to-one speaking practice fails in a specific way: the tutor talks. Every task here is built so the student has to produce and the tutor has to listen, and most of them give the student something concrete to speak about rather than an open question.
Aim for the student producing language for at least half the lesson. That sounds like a lot until you count the minutes in a typical class, where it is often nearer a fifth.
Describe and draw
The student describes a simple picture you cannot see and you draw it on the whiteboard, badly. Then swap. The information gap is real, so the language is real: prepositions of place, sizes, colors, and the clarification questions that never come up in a worksheet.
Role-play with a twist card
A situation the student can handle, a shop, a hotel desk, a doctor, plus one twist they see only when the role-play is underway: the item is sold out, the room is wrong, the doctor is running late. The twist is where the student stops reciting and starts speaking.
Four-picture story
Four images in sequence. Beginners say one sentence per picture in the present. Higher levels tell it in the past, then retell it from another character’s point of view. Same four pictures, three levels of task.
Explain the word without saying it
You name a word; the student defines it without using it, its opposite or a translation, until you guess. This is circumlocution, the skill a learner uses every time they forget a word in real life, and almost no lesson practices it on purpose.
Interview the tutor
The student asks you five questions on the lesson topic and you answer at their level. Then reverse. Learners spend whole lessons answering and almost none asking, and question formation is where beginner grammar most often breaks.
Choose, then say why
Two options on screen and the sentence frame “I would choose X because”. At higher levels, replace because with so, although or even though. It is a grammar drill that does not feel like one, because the student actually has an opinion.
Show and tell
The child brings one object to the camera. Beginners say what it is and its color. Older kids say who gave it to them and why they like it. Ask the parent the day before, or the child will bring nothing and then bring the cat.
Timed talk, one target
Ninety seconds on a topic, and you listen for one thing only, agreed in advance: past tense endings, or linking words, or not saying “like” between every clause. One target gets fixed. Five targets get a discouraged student.
Which speaking activities work for a small online group?
With two to four students the job changes: it is no longer getting one person to talk, it is making sure every person talks every round. Each of these builds the turn-taking into the activity so you are not policing it.
Groups need one more rule than one-to-one: one voice at a time, said out loud at the start, every lesson, until it is a habit.
Find someone who, in the chat
Post six prompts, “find someone who has a pet”, “find someone who woke up before seven”. Students ask each other in turn and type the name beside each. Every student has to speak to every other student, which is the whole reason to run a group.
One-sentence story
You start a story with one sentence. Each student adds exactly one, in turn, around the group twice. The rule of one sentence protects the quiet student from the confident one, and the story is always ridiculous, which is why they keep talking.
Agree or disagree cards
A statement on screen, every student holds up agree or disagree, then each gives one reason before anyone responds. The holding-up step means the shy student has already committed before the discussion starts.
Interview, then report
Pairs interview each other on three questions, then each reports to the group about their partner. Reporting forces the third person, and it means everyone listens during the interviews because they will need the answers.
Team category race
Two teams, one category, a scoreboard on screen, points for every correct word and a bonus for a full sentence. It is the one-to-one category race with the competition made visible, and it is the fastest way to wake up a group that has gone quiet.
How do you adapt speaking activities for kids, teens and adults?
Change the topic, the pacing and the tone, not the language target. The same activity, choose-then-say-why for instance, runs for a six-year-old choosing between two animals, a fourteen-year-old choosing between two games, and an adult choosing between two job offers.
Kids need activity cycles of two to five minutes, movement, and a routine that repeats every lesson so the class feels safe. Teens need topics from their own lives, a choice between two tasks, and a tone that never feels childish. Adults need situations they will actually be in, an uninterrupted minute before correction, and a clear link between the activity and the goal they are paying for.
Kids: feeling then why, show me point to, show and tell, four-picture story, team category race.Teens: would you rather, question of the day, agree or disagree cards, one-sentence story, explain the word.Adults: role-play with a twist, describe and draw, timed talk with one target, interview then report, two truths and a lie.
For a complete beginner, most of these are still too much. How to teach English to beginners has the five that work from lesson one.
How do you run these on a shared screen?
Share one screen and keep everything on it: the prompt, the timer, the scoreboard, the picture. Every time a student has to switch windows you lose thirty seconds and some of the momentum, and with a child you may lose the child.
The tools that matter are small: a visible timer, a scoreboard, a spinner for choosing topics or turns, a hidden-picture board for vocabulary reveals, and annotation so the student can circle, draw and type on the shared screen. None of them needs to be clever. All of them need to be on screen already, so an activity starts in five seconds rather than a minute of “hold on, let me find it”.
The free Classroom Toolkit
A timer, a scoreboard, an icebreaker wheel, a hidden-star board, Two Truths and a Lie, a taboo challenge and a feedback generator, all in one browser tab built for screen sharing. Free, no account.
Timer and scoreboard on one screenSpinner for turns and topicsHidden-star board for vocabulary revealsNothing to install, nothing to print
How many activities does one lesson need?
Two: one warm-up and one production task. A lesson that stacks four games is fun and teaches very little, because no single language point gets enough repetitions to stick.
The shape that works in forty-five to sixty minutes is warm-up, presentation of one target, guided practice, one production task from the lists above, wrap-up. The activity is the production stage. Choose it for the language point you taught, not for how much the student will enjoy it; the two overlap more than you would think, and when they do not, the language point wins.
A ready-made curriculum saves you the choosing. The lessons in Teachers Together English build the warm-up and the production task into every lesson, matched to the target, which is most of what a tutor is doing when they say they are planning.
Common questions
Lessons with the warm-up already built in
Six levels for kids and teens, every lesson opening with retrieval and closing with a speaking task matched to the target. A free account is enough to teach a few and see whether it fits.