In order to create structure in the lessons and make the students feel secure in a routine, WebEnglish.se has a few suggestions for intermediate classes:
Inspirational talks vary from a couple of minutes to a whole hour. They can be used on their own in order to get the class focused or as an introduction to discussions, themes and writing. There are enough (99 today) to start every week, if not every class with, throughout the year.
Amazing Pictures can be projected on the whiteboard as students come in. They should sit down and write down their ideas about and around the picture: What’s happening, why, how, where and when? What has just happened and what’s going to happen then? Various suggestions can be discussed in pairs, groups or in class. The ideas could also be acted or used as story starters for writing.
Narrative And Personal Writing Prompts can also be projected on the whiteboard as students come in. This is very effective especially with classes where the students tend to ‘drop-in’ during the first couple of minutes. The prompt could be chosen to suit the theme at hand or randomly and used in various ways; as freewriting, collected in a folder or continuous document; as discussion starters in pairs, groups or whole class or as a warm-up for the topic of the day.
99 Chinese Fortune Cookies are short aphorisms to start a discussion with. I used to print them out and let a volunteer choose one randomly at the beginning of every lesson. They would read the message out loud, write it on the board and we would discuss the meaning and implications of the quote to our lives. My students used to want to keep the piece of paper as memorabilia. (Price: $2.50 at TeachersPayTeachers)
Whether you choose to use the same kind of a starter for every lesson, a different one for the different days of the week or randomly as a surprise factor, they will help to calm down the class and create a nice atmosphere for learning for the rest of the lesson.
This is an updated post from August 20, 2016.