This game is great because it gets kids moving too! I play that game but I call it fruit bowl, and the first thing I do is choose 3 types of fruit, and assign each person in the circle a fruit. The person in the middle also finds a seat. As an English and Drama teacher in the UK I liked ice-breakers that got students moving so a circle of naming someone and moving to their place is a good one. Thank you for providing games that I can introduce and play with the students to get everyone cozy with each other!
Icebreakers that Rock | Cult of Pedagogy
Love these games that get kids moving, talking and connecting. Can I post a link to them from my website? Perfect way to get to know people. Hi Jennifer, I am preparing for the beginning of the year and am looking forward to using the ice breakers with my students. Thank you so much for this. These are so much better.
Icebreakers that Rock
Having the slides makes it simple and will hold their attention easily for a quick get to know you intro. Thank you so much for looking out for the shy, introverted, quiet middle-schoolers like my daughter. Thanks for better choices! I am a new teacher in Australia and I am desperately seeking good resources for our start of the year Thank you for these ice breakers; they sound absolutely fantastic. I will be teaching 4th and 5th grade this year and am so excited to try these games!!
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These are just like some of the Kagan strategies. Concentric Circles aka Inside Out, can be used for review using the strategy, Quiz-Quiz-trade, wher each student has a question. When the teacher says time to rotate, the pair swaps questions and moves on and repeat the cycle. Blobs and Lines has a name as well, but it is escaping my mind summer brain.
Another post suggested for student to do it without talking. You can have them use them white board or notebooks.
Thanks for sharing these great idea. Thank you so much! I agree with the first part of your post that most icebreakers are terrible; for some people, that is. Being an introvert means that because there is so much thinking going on in my head, it takes an incredible amount of energy for me to interact with people, even people I love.
Line up alphabetically by first or last name? This is wasted time! Why not just let it melt naturally and let people get to know each other as needed in the course of time? These activities more or less forced me to interact with strangers, definitely taking me out of my comfort zone. But I also found myself making really great connections with people I may not otherwise have made on my own. What I came to realize is that I started developing an appreciation for the way they created an immediate sense of belonging. Ice breakers seem to lay the necessary groundwork for building the trust, connections and relationships that are required for future higher stakes collaboration.
I love these ice breakers. I usually hate them myself. With the blobs and lines one, I did not understand how it encourages familiarity. I think I missed something. It just quickly helps students to see what simple things they have in common. Students tend to form cliques that can be tough to break up over time; something like Blobs and Lines crosses all kinds of boundaries and helps students see each other a bit differently. It also gets them moving and talking on easy topics. Click here to find out more.
I really appreciate your take on icebreakers as I am always looking for effective ones each year. It helps me remember 60 names by the third day of school. I am glad I ran across your post today. My class loved them, and wanted more the next day. They were really engaged the entire time.
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I used it myself when I was a substitute — I wrote three facts about myself on the board before the class arrived. Most of them read them when they got to class. It was a great way to break the ice with the class. Just a warning, blobbing people by eye color is very close to blobbing by skin color. Also check out drama therapy websites for other exciting games. We invent them everyday. Used these with my three high school music groups one game each. We had time for only half of the prompts. Thanks for these ideas! Does everyone go up in front of the group and state his or her position before going to one side of the room or the other?
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After reading a statement, students first choose a position, move to the side of the room that matches it, and then they take turns from either side talking about why they chose their position. Hope this helps and have fun! Just wanted to say this was a very enlightening post about not making things more awkward for this age group. I have been using the first two ice breaker activities for a long time in my German classes.
I picked them up from PD on cooperative learning from the Kagan book. Concentric circles is also used as a review structure to help students review content. This list is really great! They can be used as a topic starter, conversation at the family diner, fun game on a road trip, or writing prompts. Thank you for sharing it! We played the Blobs and Lines game tonight at a teacher training session. It was a hit! Everyone was laughing and having a good time!
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Thank you so much for sharing! Either they are too elementary, too cheesy incite too much craziness on the first day. Thank you for sharing these IceBreakers.
This will be my first year teaching 4th grade and I was looking for some new ideas. Can you please send me these ice breakers on power point. Thanks so much for sharing!!! They are for sale on Teachers Pay Teachers. The image you click should take you there. The images at the bottom of the post will link you there. This time they might decide to group by types of shoes or brands of shoes. It leads to more discussion and collaboration. Thank you so much for this post Jennifer! While the intention behind ice breakers is good- building relationships, encouraging speaking in class, etc- we need to be very intentional when we craft these exercises.
I love the idea of mobile debating with some low-stakes questions, and I love the idea of the clumps! I think it would be fun to sparse out these games throughout the year. It takes more than one ice breaker to break the ice, and I imagine as the class climate gets established you could do more of these personal games.