Teenagers: Warmers: Fruit and vegetables

Aims

• To practise simple personal questions:
  
  What’s your name?
  How old are you?
  Are you married?
  How many children do you have?
  What’s your job?
• To revise basic vocabulary
• To break the ice and make students relax and enjoy using English
• To incorporate body language and intonation in the lesson
• To get students moving around the classroom and changing the dynamics away from a teacher-led activity

Procedure

• Ask students to write down the following words on a scrap of paper, keeping what they write secret form those around them.
• Tell them to write:
  
  1. the name of a fruit
  2. the name of a vegetable
  3. a number between 1 and 200
  4. Ask them to write the answer to this question – Do you like football?
  5. How many pencils and pens do you have?
  6. What is the first thing you do every morning?
• Now tell them that these things are actually:
  
  1. their first name
  2. their family name
  3. their age
  4. are they married?
  5. how many children they have
  6. their job
• Now they must get up and go around the class and ask the personal questions and share information about their new selves.
• Encourage them to shake hands (if appropriate) and make eye contact when meeting new people.
• If they don’t automatically use intonation appropriate for surprise etc, why not model it before the activity. For example:
  
  
  How old are you?
  A hundred and fifty seven.
  Really!? (said with rising intonation and a long stretch of the word)
• This game ensures that students really listen to the answers of their questions as it is an information gap – they won’t know what the answers will be.