Five-Minute Activities: A Resource Book of Short Activities (Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers)

This book is a great help for all Primary School teachers, who have to come up every day with a thrilling new idea of how to practise the English language with 6 to 10-year-olds. Thanks for writing it.

I can't say enough good things about this book, it's just full of great ideas which take almost no preparation. As an ESL teacher I struggle with two things, one is boredom, teaching the same material over and over, and trying to find new ways to re-enforce what I just taught. This book wins on both counts, first it has so many simple no prep ideas that I'm never bored, secondly it has some great exercises to help re-enforce that grammar point you just taught.

Highly recommended

This is an excellent resource for teachers of English as a foreign language, containing tens upon tens of interesting and fun ideas for language activities. They would, however require more than five minutes to do with a class, the average time would be, I'd say, around 10-15 minutes, more if you want. (Maybe the five minutes were refering to the time the teacher needs to prepare them?)

Underneath the title of each activity, there is a short description of what language issue it is aimed at. After the activity is explained, one or more variations of it are provided (which, in turn, can inspire you to more variations). After some of the activities, "boxes" are provided, with samples of contents that could be used for that particular activity. At the end of the book, the index lists activities according to their aims, making it easier to zero in on what you need at any given moment.

You can, of course, adapt the exercises in all kinds of creative ways (changing the aim of an activity, but keeping its pattern, changing the pattern, but keeping the aim, etc.), but, should you not be in the mood to make changes, the book as it is provides a wealth of resources offering variety, entertainment, and an "outside-the-box" approach to learning the language. I will keep it as a valuable resource for as long as I teach.

5 minutes fun for your students. Apart from (stupid) jokes, this book is really useful for short activities in the classroom. I already know what this book was about because I had seen a copy of it and it was recommended to me by other teachers. In my Teacher Training Course we even tried out some of the activities suggested; they work and are good fun too.

This little book is well worth the money. Easy to dip into during lessons, most activities require no preparation. Also it has a useful index where you can search by language outcome or game title.

I use it loads!