My previous post called 10 nifty starters for language lessons had a lot of views in a short time (thank you Twitter and Facebook), so I thought teachers might appreciate some ideas for plenaries - ends of lessons which round up or review language used during the lesson. You could add these to your current repertoire. To begin with, I don't think for one moment that every lesson needs a starter or a plenary. Hopefully the days are gone when three part, four part, or X part lessons seemed prescribed. But there is some sense in using the start of a lesson to review language used in the previous lesson(s) and there is some sense in giving a lesson plan some extra shape and clear purpose for students by including a plenary. In reality, by the time you get to the end of a lesson, both you and the students may have had enough and a plenary may seem superfluous. I certainly did more starters than plenaries. One old web page described the purpose of plenaries as follows: To help pupils re
I've spent a good few hours in recent weeks working on starters and 'do-now' activities for beginners and pre-intermediate level students (A1 to A2 in CEFR terms). So I thought I'd put together a set of ten examples of starters I could recommend. What they have in common is use of the target language (some focus more on output, some on input), retrieval of exisiting language, repetition, simplicity , clarity and structure . The last three points are important. If you want to get the lesson off to that famous 'flying start' then students need to know precisely what they have to do. When they arrive with their heads full of stuff from the last lesson or just random stuff, then you need to get them switched on pretty rapidly. For other blogs about MFL/WL starters you could check out this one by Rebecca Nobes, this one by Sabina or this one from MFL Classroom magic (the author is a former trainee of mine). Clare Seccombe has also curated examples here . Wort