This is the final entry in a three part series on warmers, coolers and fillers and as you might have guessed it is the last of these three, fillers. Unlike warmers and coolers, fillers are not going to appear in every ESL lesson a teacher gives, however they should be prepared for every single one. Sometimes a class may run a bit short and having a filler activity handy will do just as its name implies. And, like its siblings, a filler has three main features it should be quick, topical and of course, fun!
Fill in the Gaps
To reiterate, fillers are not always going to be used in every lesson you teach. If you have your lesson timed out well and all the activities go as planned you probably will not need a filler. However, it never hurts to have one ready for when there is a hiccup or two. You may bring in a solid lesson plan, but the students may just surprise you and power through it. They may finish the material quicker than you anticipated or you may have made too much room for questions, or maybe the student that often asks the most questions is home sick. Whatever the reason, you need to be ready.
Remember though, fillers ought still to be quick. If there is space for a filler chances are it is not going to require a long activity, a quick game will suffice. In addition, like the cooler the filler will often come at the end of the lesson, so try and choose something that will help you to sum up the lesson, do not create more questions for the students. A quick game or puzzle activity which uses some of the vocabulary from the lesson would be great.
Not only should the filler be quick it should also be topical. The activity should not seem to just come out of nowhere. I have done this in classes before and it really did not go well. An example of this was when I was teaching a business English class at a small design firm. The class was small, about five or six people, but very rarely did all the students show up, thus it was often difficult to predict how long activities would last. The students also varied a lot in what kind of activities they enjoyed. One student loved to play word games, while two of the other students preferred discussion and more question and answer based activities, another student only showed up once and so I did not have much of an idea of what he enjoyed. Needless to say, the class could be problematic.
Relate to the Lesson
One lesson in particular gave me a significant amount of trouble. We were working out of the text book on formal and informal language and it was going fairly smoothly, too smoothly in fact and we ended up finishing too early. I however, had failed to prepare a filler and had to throw one in on the spot. The filler I chose to do was a preposition game where I would say a word and the students would have to say the preposition that best fit with the word. For example, “Tuesday” would match “on.” A student would get a point every time he or she said a correct combination. The goal of the students was to accumulate more points than their fellow classmates. The activity itself was a good activity in that it got the students practicing an area they often had trouble with and it tickled their competitive bones, the problem was that it was unrelated to the subject matter we discussed. Another problem was that one of the students present still had more questions about the main subject matter of the class and so was not paying much attention to the filler. He ended up losing badly to the other students and was clearly upset and I had to go back to address his questions anyway.
I made quite a few mistakes in the lesson and they could have all been addressed if I had A. prepared better ahead of time and B. paid more attention to my students. I could have prepared an activity that practiced the formal language we had been discussing earlier and had it ready as a filler. I also could have taken a bit more time to address further questions, the question and answer alone may have filled the extra time just fine.
Always Have Your Fillers Ready
The filler is a dynamic tool that you can use in a lesson, but they need to be in the toolbox in order to be used. Making things up on the spot, although it can work at times, can more often than not be an iffy enterprise. Preparing fillers that relate to your material will help you to keep the students’ focused and really help to hammer in the material that you wanted to cover for the lesson. An unrelated activity may turn out okay for the students that have the material down or who were not much interested in the material in the first place, but they are always going to leave questions unanswered.
Finally, just like warmers and coolers, fillers should be fun or at the very least interesting. Like activities that are on topic, fillers that are fun and interesting will keep the students attention. After a long lesson students are not going to want that lesson to drag on. A fun activity will help to keep the feeling of drudgery at bay. A lesson, especially in an adult-in-company course, ought to be a break from work, it should be enjoyable. If students do not feel they are getting anything out of a lesson they will just not come. Make your fillers fun and that gap in a lesson that could be awkward and confusing for students will not be.
Now go and create warmers, coolers and fillers that will get your students charged up and coming to every class ready and willing to learn. Make them quick and on point and most of all fun!
Jonathan McKie - A talented, hilarious and interesting comedian and freelance writer from Ontario, Canada.
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