There are a raft of fillers to be found online, long lists, any one of which can fill unexpected shortfalls in prepared material. By their very nature they tend to be used at, or near, the end of a lesson.
Here are a few suggestions for fillers that are not to be found on many of these lists.
- Revision – Simply ask students to look back through their textbook for 5/10 minutes or so. Do your students ever take the time to recycle previously studied pages? Maybe some do, but I’d wager most don’t.
- Preparation – Have students browse though the next unit in the textbook.
- Q/A Session – Have a question-answer session whereby students can ask the teacher about anything study-related. Probably best to allow a little time for students to gather their thoughts.
- Tell a story – You will need to have one up your sleeve. Maybe it is a real story à la Aesop or Han Christian Andersen; or it could be a cautionary tale; or maybe something about yourself that might interest the students.
- Pep-talk – Tell the students how good they are, and how happy you are with their progress, ‘Yes we can!’
- Forget about any filler, and just get on with the next page of the textbook; worry about any consequence later.
There are multiple options for fillers but I have found none as effective as the spelling test procedure described in the book.
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