Raise their hand who always struggles to come up with a fun ice breaker for their first class.
Yep, been there myself!
The students don't know you. You don't know the students. And you don't even know what level they are exactly. So here are two activities
you can do on your first day of class
you need little prep for
you can do at any level.
Before looking at the activities, you might be asking yourself “Okay, but what’s the goal?”.
These two activities will allow you to see how much the students know about
grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and intonation
Also, you will see whether the students know how to
explain what they want to say when they don’t know a word
ask for clarification when they can’t understand
express interest…
… in two words: their communication strategies.
Let’s get right into it!
Ice breaker #1: Five things about me.
First, a little bit of prep BEFORE class!
1. Open your PowerPoint
2. Write your name in the middle
3. Write 5 things about yourself. These things can be:
Things you like or you don't like
Things you did, you usually do, you're going to do, you'd like to
Places you visited or you're going to visit
A number or a colour you like
Things that annoy you and so on…
Now, in class.
1. Tell your students "You're going to find about a few things about myself".
2. Show them gradually the things you wrote.
3. Say "You have to guess what these pictures or words mean. How? By asking a question".
4. Do the first one as an example. Put them in pairs and have them think of a question.
5. Tell them that it's okay not to guess the right question.
In our example with “Nutella”, the questions might be:
"What's your favourite food?" OR
"What's a food you don't like much?" OR
“What’s a food you used to eat?” OR
“What’s one food item you would never eat for breakfast because it has too many calories?”.
You got the gist!
Now,
1. Ask the students what questions they came up with.
2. Check as a whole class.
3. Say "yes", "no" or "close" to their answers.
This is the stage where you start seeing what the students know and how much they know.
It’s their turn!
1. Tell them that it's their turn to create a similar page.
Tell them they can think about the past / present / future.
2. Give them 3 minutes. Go around to give support.
3. Set a communicative goal: "Find one interesting thing about each other".
4. Have the students talk with each other.
Go around to see what mistakes they make and provide feedback.
You can have them change partners, so that they get to speak with many people in the class.
Ice breaker #2: 5 questions
Quick background info:
I did this activity with my advanced class.
This is how it works.
1. Divide the students in pairs.
2. Tell them to come up with 5 questions they would like to ask the others.
For each question, they have to think of a follow-up question.
Remind them that
a. “What’s your name?”
b. “Where are you from?” do not count as questions!
3. Before having them come up with the questions, ask them “What’s the purpose of this task?”. It might be for
networking,
getting to know each other,
practicing listening and speaking, conversational skills.
Go around the class to see if they need support and provide feedback.
Once they are ready, they can interview each other.
Give a communicative goal:
Find two people you think you will work well together with in this course OR
Find two people you think are different from you
Of course, you will monitor them.
Once the activity is over,
have the students report on what they found out and do error feedback.
You will also find the feedback we worked on in class.
Now you have two ideas for your first class!
And if you're looking for icebreakers for your Business English,
make sure to check out this lesson idea on teaching the first day in a Business class!
🗨️ Over to you:
What's your go-to icebreaker for the first class?
Share it in the comments!
Source of the speech bubble: https://emojipedia.org/left-speech-bubble
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If you want to get in touch with me, I’m just an email away!
See you next time!
Thanks for sharing! When it comes to ice-breakers we might run out of ideas, but we can also exploit the ones we can have. For instance, I provide the topics and students have to come up with questions so they can get to know each other ( sport --> do you like watching sports? when was the last time you practised a sport? etc; family: who do you live with, who do get on well with?, etc). Sometimes I notice students need something extra to guide them, so I use the topics ;).