This year WebEnglish.se recommends you start your term with One Word New Year Resolutions. The social media is teeming with examples from teachers and Whole Wheat Class gives out free One Little Word New Year’s Posters in TpT. There are many more New Year Activities in the new Theme Page about NewYear.
One of my favourite speaking activities in the first lesson is ‘Find Someone Who’. After the students have walked about asking their friends and written a different name on most of the lines, I ask them: “Who found someone who…?” and the person who has done the actual activity can tell something about it (with me asking follow-up questions). This can take half the lesson.
A twist to ‘Find someone who’ is to give each student a strange activity that you know for sure nobody did. Then they can come up with the whole imaginative story and tell the others first in groups and then some for the whole class.
This blog post is updated from Jan 2019.