Back to school icebreakers

Ready to get back to lessons? Looking forward to meeting your new students and start breaking the ice?

Here you are four icebreakers for those first lessons when you are all willing to get to know one another better.

Hope you enjoy them!

New School Year Greetings

We all know that after summer breaks, the first thing back in class is to introduce ourselves and tell everybody about our vacation, but, why not doing it through a voice mail? That will give everybody time to settle down a little bit.

Speakpipe allows you to record, receive, download, answer, and listen to your students' new school year greetings. Just embed it on your blog and let those shy new students leave their voice messages. Besides, you will be able to start assessing their speaking skills.

New School Year Resolutions

Build a Padlet wall and get your students to put their wishes and expectations for the new school year on it. It is a quick, easy and collaborative tool that you can always keep on filling along the year and then use it at the end of terms to check out if their resolutions are on the right track.

What would your students like to know about you?

As a teacher, prepare a timeline of your life in advance. Then, get students to ask you questions so they try to guess your birth date, what months are special for you and why, which years you may regard as turning points, and so on. Then, let them see your timeline to check if they were right. Finally, you can ask them to create and share their own timelines. Timerine makes this task quite easy and entertaining.

Self-portraits

Ask your students to plan a paragraph about themselves, their self-portrait, and share their writings through an online drive. Revise and assess the drafts together. When they have a final piece to hand in, get them to read them aloud as a rehearsal, and then record their self-portraits. 

You may choose either to create an audio or a video gallery with all the outputs and disseminate them all over your favourite video channel or sound community.

If they are brave enough, you could even challenge them to video or audio stream their self-portraits.

Photo from ELTpics