Primary Activities
Fifteen activities that need no materials beyond a pencil and paper, take about ten minutes each, and work with one child or thirty.
How to use these
Each activity says what it practises and roughly how long it takes. None needs printing, buying or preparing the night before.
They work at home with one child and in a classroom with a whole grade. Where a class version differs, it is noted.
Speaking and listening
1. I spy with a sound
Practises: letter sounds, vocabulary. Time: 5 minutes.
Say: I spy with my little eye something beginning with mmm. Use the sound, not the letter name. The child looks around the room and guesses.
Swap over and let the child choose. Their turn matters more than yours, because choosing a word means finding its first sound themselves.
In class: in pairs, two minutes each way.
2. What is missing
Practises: vocabulary, memory, listening. Time: 5 minutes.
Put five or six ordinary objects on the table. Name them together. The child closes their eyes; take one away. What is missing?
The child must answer in a whole sentence: The spoon is missing. Not just spoon.
Add objects as it gets easy. Eight is hard; ten is very hard.
3. Twenty questions
Practises: question forms, thinking aloud. Time: 10 minutes.
Think of an animal, an object or a person. The child asks questions that can be answered only yes or no. Is it an animal? Does it live in water? Is it bigger than a dog?
This is the fastest way to teach question word order, because a badly formed question gets no useful answer and the child fixes it themselves.
4. Tell it in three sentences
Practises: sequencing, speaking in sentences. Time: 5 minutes.
Ask the child to tell you something that happened today in exactly three sentences: what happened first, what happened next, what happened at the end.
Three is the useful number. One is too easy and five turns into rambling.
Words and spelling
5. Word ladders
Practises: spelling patterns, sounds. Time: 10 minutes.
Write a three-letter word. Change one letter to make a new word. Keep going: cat, cot, cop, top, tap, tip.
The child sees that changing one letter changes one sound. That is the whole of early spelling in one activity.
6. How many words in this word
Practises: letters, spelling, patience. Time: 10 minutes.
Write a long word on the paper - elephant, breakfast, playground. The child makes as many smaller words as they can from its letters.
elephant gives ten, heat, plane, and more. Count them together at the end and try to beat the number next time.
7. The alphabet shopping list
Practises: vocabulary, alphabet order, memory. Time: 10 minutes.
I went to the shop and I bought an apple. The next person adds something beginning with b, and repeats the list from the start.
In class: in groups of five or six, so the wait is short.
8. Odd one out
Practises: vocabulary, categories, reasoning. Time: 5 minutes.
Say four words: apple, banana, carrot, mango. Which is the odd one out, and why?
The answer is carrot, because it is a vegetable. But if the child says banana, because the others are round, accept it. The reason matters more than the word.
Reading and writing
9. Read the room
Practises: reading in the real world. Time: 10 minutes.
Find and read ten pieces of English that are not in a book: a label, a signboard, a bus, a shop name, a packet, a poster.
Children who only ever read schoolbooks think reading is a school activity. It is not.
10. Mixed-up sentence
Practises: word order, capital letters, full stops. Time: 5 minutes.
Write a sentence with the words in the wrong order: garden the in playing children are the. The child writes it correctly.
Insist on the capital letter and the full stop every time. That habit is worth more than the exercise.
11. What happens next
Practises: writing, imagination, sentences. Time: 10 minutes.
Give the first sentence of a story: The gate was open, and the dog was gone. The child writes the next three sentences.
Three sentences, not a page. A short piece finished is worth more than a long piece abandoned.
12. Draw what I read
Practises: listening, reading for detail. Time: 10 minutes.
Read a short description slowly: There is a small house with two windows and a red door. A tall tree stands on the left. The child draws exactly what they hear.
Compare the drawing with the words at the end. Every difference is a detail that was missed, and the child can see it themselves.
For a whole class
13. Line up by letter
Practises: alphabet order, cooperation. Time: 5 minutes.
The class lines up in alphabetical order by first name, without the teacher directing them. They have to talk to each other in English to do it.
14. Silent sentence
Practises: word order, working together. Time: 10 minutes.
Give six children one word each from a sentence. Without speaking, they arrange themselves in the right order at the front of the class.
The rest of the class reads the sentence aloud when they think it is right.
15. Two truths and one lie
Practises: speaking, listening, questioning. Time: 10 minutes.
Each child says three sentences about themselves. Two are true and one is not. The others ask questions and guess which is which.
Quiet children usually join in with this one, because everybody gets exactly three sentences and nobody has to keep going.
A note for teachers
These are activities, not a syllabus. They practise things a child has already met; they do not teach them for the first time.
More structured material for the classroom is in Teacher Resources, including lesson plans and worksheets.