Icebreakers are great opportunities to get to know your students and for students to get to know their classmates. While the time it takes to facilitate these fun activities is usually sacrificed due to time constraints, having these non-academic conversations goes a long way. They give a chance for everyone to participate in, help build a positive classroom atmosphere, and are low-risk, informal ways to practice your classroom norms. Here are some icebreaker ideas with accompanying links:
1. Two Truths and a Lie
Write three statements about yourself - two of your statements should be true, and one should be made up. Be creative! Then, have them guess which statement is false and explain their choice. Check it out at this blog post!
2. Time to take a Selfie
Have students take a selfie and answer some questions about themselves on a Padlet wall, similar to how I did it with the 'Second Start' Padlet. To encourage learning about their classmates, have students play a trivia game with their classmates. Creating this trivia game will help you learn about your students too!
Have students take a selfie and answer some questions about themselves on a Padlet wall, similar to how I did it with the 'Second Start' Padlet. To encourage learning about their classmates, have students play a trivia game with their classmates. Creating this trivia game will help you learn about your students too!
Credit to Catlin Tucker3. Who am I?
Give three clues to a person and have the classmates guess who or what the person is. If you do this during videoconferencing, have the student turn off their video camera and then reveal him/herself after their classmates guess. I did this during a professional development videoconference session around Halloween and it was a hit.
If you are working with younger students, you can start with student-parent icebreakers. This inspires a dialogue between students with their parents. It also helps introduce parents to online space so they feel comfortable about the work being done online.
