Take ordinary household objects and get them to match the English word with the visual image.

Award points which they can redeem later for a Spanish/English dictionary.

go through the ABCs having each student name an animal and then writing it up on the board. first student names an animal starting with the letter A, like anteater. Next student gets the letter B and so on.

u r so lucky. my moms an esl teacher 2 lol. im lookin at her plan rite now. it sez:

*put the kids in groups. pick a random letter from the alphabet and make the groups work together to find a person, place, and thing that starts with that letter.

*play simon says but use commands like "touch your nose" or "go to the door". use commands that make the kids use whatever vocab they have of the english language.

I somtimes use this as a filler when I have unexpected time left in the lesson, or as a warm-up.

draw a silhouette of a person on the board, and tell them "everybody knows the parts of the body, right? Well, how many can be verbs, as well?"

To head home, nose your way into traffic, elbow your way through the crowd, shoulder extra responsibility, eye something in a store, hand somehting over, finger the guilty party, knee him in the crotch, back up the car, stomach his insults.

That should kill a good 15 minutes of your lesson.

For the closing part of your lesson, you can think of a number of words they don't know, such as dew, tar, flannel, gasp, tread, etc. and write them on small pieces of paper. Give a word (or two) to each pair, and a dictionary. They must write down the real definition, and then invent 2 fake definitions. Then they read them out, and everyone votes on which one they think is the real definition.

Another great time waster, (but not for a shy class) is two truths, one lie. You write up 2 things that are true (I have gone skydiving, I used to have a snake as a pet) and one thing that is false (my mother used to drive a truck to make extra money) and they have to ask you questions to try and figure out which one is true, and which is the lie. Oddly enough, no matter how well you lie, or how implausible your truths and how beleiveable your lie, the majority are able to sniff out the lie.

This one goes well with teaching the present perfect, if you try to structure the truths and lies by "I have . . . "

Both the dictionary activity and the two truths, one lie take up around 20-30 minutes each.

Good luck!

You don't give enough information for a competent answer. What tense are you teaching? What level of learning are your students at? What is the average age of your students? What is their learning curve? See what I mean?

For what age group?

Bubbles are fun and cheap. You could work with that.

or

Animals????

Sorry, I would help more but I am not sure what you are looking for.