These games are perfect for building foundational language skills while keeping learning fun and active.
Here are some great warm-up activities and games to use in the classroom to help learners have fun and consolidate learning skills.
1. Alphabet Treasure Hunt
- Objective: Learn letters and connect them to objects.
- How to Play: Ask students to choose 5 letters from the Alphabet Chart
- They must find objects in the room that begin with the letters that they chose.
- Variation: If you're teaching online, students can circle the letters on the screen and play the game by finding objects around the room.
Top Tip: Use Posters, Pictures, Flashcards, and Games to reinforce reading skills and phonics sound groupings.
2. Alphabet Musical Chairs
- Objective: Practice recognizing letters and their sounds.
- How to Play: Draw a circle around random letters. Play music, and Stop on a random letter. Take turns with students, and ask them to name a word that starts with that letter (e.g., for “T” they can say “tiger”).
3. Alphabet Relay Race
- Objective: Identify letters and move physically.
- How to Play: Divide the children into two teams. Place a set of letter cards on one side of the room and give each team a list of letters to find.
- Players take turns running to the other side to pick a card, matching the correct letter with the list. The first team to collect all their letters wins!
- Variation: Online, use an alphabet chart and call out letters. Students can point to the correct letter on their charts.
Top Tip: Use Flashcards to help prompt vocabulary building, and use the alphabet to aid learning of the names for insects, clothes, objects etc...
4. Alphabet Soup
- Objective: Build words using letter sounds.
- How to Play: Prepare a "soup pot" (can be a bowl or basket) filled with magnetic letters or cut-out alphabet cards. Call out a word (e.g., "cat"), and students take turns pulling letters from the pot to spell the word. Once the word is made, they can "stir" the pot and start with a new word.
- Variation: For online classes, you can use a virtual whiteboard and have students pick letters from an alphabet chart.
5. Alphabet Fishing
- Objective: Match uppercase and lowercase letters.
- How to Play: Create a “pond” by scattering letter cards (both uppercase and lowercase) on the floor. Make simple fishing poles with magnets at the end of the string, and attach a paperclip to each letter card. Students “fish” for a letter, then match it with its uppercase or lowercase pair.
- Variation: Online, you can create a matching activity where students click and drag uppercase and lowercase letters into pairs.