Icebreakers that work

The school year is drawing to an end and, while most people believe we teachers are getting truly excited about spending two months off, really we are -maybe not all of us- thinking of new or just good, effective ways to start up over again next September.

One thing that takes me back to when I started teaching is the first day of the school year. A new classroom, new resources and most importantly new, unknown students. The feeling when you enter a room full of unfamiliar faces is similar to the those last seconds when your plane is next to take off and you’ve never before experienced flying in your life. This feeling is a common shared experience among teachers, especially among those teachers who believe that giving a good impression on the first day is crucial for the following hundreds of minutes they’re going to spend in that room with all those learners.

That’s it! First impressions. First moment ever with your new students. Your new kind of family for nine or ten months. Experience teaches us that first impressions are decisive in the short and long run, so we have to be careful and pay attention to details when we are about to set off on our new teaching/learning journeys.

And because first days are important, I’ve decided to post this entry with some of my best first-day experiences. Here’s three activities I’ve been using as icebreakers for the past five years and that have worked out exceptionally fine with me and my several different groups. I normally teach adults in a monolingual context, so be warned that perhaps these activities won’t work as smoothly with other groups.

1. Find Someone Who

A classic. Everyone who teaches an FL knows about this icebreaker. The idea is simple: get your students to speak to each other for a set amount of time. Usually, students are given (or shown) a list of easy-to-answer questions that they can either read off the paper of just utter them out by heart. Students mill around the room asking and responding to different questions about themselves.

How do I make this one different? Very easy. Just add a few student-created questions to your list and that’s it. They’re ready to go. As I said before, the first day is key to finding out about your students and for them to discover things about you and their partners. Why don’t you then ask them to come up with interesting questions they’d love to ask? Of course, all new questions should be analyzed first (you can have students read them out loud to you first while you pick the best ones out and write them down on the board, or just decide the ones you find appropriate while monitoring the pre-intraction activity). This way is also important to get to know your students’ use of the language from the very beginning.

 

2. Roll It!

This one here has recently been my top 1 first-day icebreaker. It’s a sort of Find Someone Who with an additional motivational factor: some toilet paper rolls.

First thing I do is: show them the toilet paper roll. I ask them if they’ve ever seen one before and tell them it’s an extremely versatile thing in our lives. At this point students look at me with a mix of bewilderment and intriguing confusion that makes them giggle. That’s just fine. That goes to show that the outcome of this activity is doing alright. If there’s no such reaction, you may well want to try something different out or just give it a go and see what happens. In my experience, it’s always been a success.

After this moment of confusion and what-the-heck-is-going-on-in-here sort of feeling, I go on to explain the activity. I tell students that the paper roll will be passed along and they have to take as much paper as they think they’ll need. Normally, I’d tell them to tear out some three to five squares for the sake of time and quantity of paper per student. When everybody has their share, I tell them that they now have to speak to as many students as squares of paper they’ve got. So, for example, if eight students have 4 squares, they’ll have to speak to four different students. Here there’s no controlling of questions, so anything the students would like to know about their peers is just fine. However, I always walk around among them monitoring the activity and “butting in” with “alternative questions” whenever I feel like I have to.

At the end (once everyone has used up all their toilet paper), I round it off in different ways depending on the mood. I very often have students explain something interesting about the people they interviewed. Sometimes I just take some of their squares randomly and read them out, so that students will have to remember the details in order to explain the class about their partners. 

 

3. Blind Encounters

Blind Encounters came out of a blackout experience at a school I used to work in. I remember the moment as a back-sweating experience. I was giving out the course details and just about time to start introducing myself to the students when there was an electricity outage in the area. First day jitters had never felt so badly in my life. It was outrageous! But you know what? I stood calm and thought to myself: every cloud has its silver lining, they say. And that moment right there was my silver lining.

To smooth it all out a little and relieve some tension off the students, I told them how grateful I was the school hadn’t paid for the electricity bills that month so that my next activity could become a success. Students laughed. Good for me! So at that exact moment it all began. I asked them to stand up and walk around carefully noticing the things and the people around them. Whenever they bumped into someone (or something), they’d have to “explore” it, that is to speak to the person or just analyze what they’ve come across. It wasn’t really just words in conversation I was primarily interested in. I also wanted them to become acquainted with the physicality of the room, its dimensions, its furnishings, the atmosphere...

The light came back on right in the middle of the activity, which was a bit of a downer. However, students had had enough time to experience the room and sense things as they wouldn’t have normally done before, which worked out fine for me because now I could spend a few more minutes with them sitting or standing in pairs doing some conversation.

At the end, I asked them to tell everyone about what they’d felt, experienced or just talked about. I wrote down some things on the board I had experienced while the activity was going on. Things related to the room or to some bits of the conversations I’d overheard from my students. In the end, that dark cloud proved to have the biggest, shiniest silver lining!

Each class, each group of students and each activity planned for them is a unique experience, not just from the start but for the rest of the school year. It holds true that everyone has to find out the resources, ideas and creative moments that are best for them so that the experience becomes a hit that’s worth remembering and sharing.

So, if you have any experiences that you’d like to share with me and with the rest of the world, please do! The more, the super better!