| Dear Baffled:
Remember, we teachers want to reinforce good behavior and demonstrate the negative consequences of bad behavior. If you start late or interrupt your class to catch up the latecomers you are rewarding bad behavior and punishing good behavior! I suggest you announce at the next class that henceforth the lesson will be starting on time, and that stragglers will no longer be given instant replays of the class time they have missed (although they can ask for extra homework to catch up). Then, stick to the policy! When you start with a new group, announce the policy the first day.
That said, however, I would recommend that you begin each class with a brief exercise that both motivates students to arrive on time and leaves a bit of a grace period for student arrival (5-10 minutes, depending on the length of the class). These activities could be done individually, with a partner or in teams. Having team competitions adds peer pressure for students to arrive on time. It is also, as silly as it may sound, a huge motivator to offer a reward for the winners, on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, depending on how long your class will be together. Candy is always a great reward, and places like dollar stores are excellent sources of cheap prizes.
Here are some activities you might challenge your students with:
1. Answering a trivia question or questions of the day
2. Solving a riddle or "one-minute mystery"
3. Unscrambling a word or words
4. Finding as many words as possible from the letters of a longer word, e.g., "dictionary" can generate tin, ton, day, ran, diction, candy, etc. Set rules, such as: each letter used just once in a word, English words only, no proper nouns, etc.
5. Completing a grammar-related activity, e.g., find all the errors in a series of sentences, and correct them
6. Finding the differences between two similar pictures (to make this harder, give one of the similar pictures to each of two students, and have them describe their pictures to each other, with no peeking)
7. Completing tasks such as finding the largest number of imaginative uses for an everyday object (e.g., paper clip, toothpick, paper cup)
8. Coming up with entertaining captions or explanations for unusual magazine pictures
9. Trying to find the true or funniest imaginary meaning of idioms (e.g., "shake a leg")
For more ideas, check out "Five-Minute Activities" by Penny Ur, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
So, my dear Baffled, try this advice and you may soon find your stragglers showing up on time.
The Teacher Advisor
Do you have more ideas for warm-up activities? Do you have a question for the Teacher Advisor? Do write and send them to us for publication in our next newsletter.
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