4/15/2024 0 Comments Ice breaker games for kindergartenI have no idea where I picked them up, but they are not original to me. I should add that I take no credit for inventing these games. Each activity supplies students with real topics to talk about, topics that actually help students get to know each other, without forcing anyone to reveal anything too personal.Įach of these will likely sound familiar to you, although the names may not be exactly what you’ve known them as. What I like about all of them is that they get students talking, but require very little social risk. In my own classrooms, with middle school, high school, and college students, I have played all three of these games with great success. Instead, I’m going to share my three favorites with you. So I have scrapped my plan to curate good icebreakers from the Internet. One year I just rebelled and picked a different letter I think I called myself something like Indoor Jenn, due to my aversion to the outdoors. This means having to listen to Jammin’ Jenn over and over, my eyes rolling, my grimace deepening. Once you’ve chosen your word, people have to go around the circle repeating the newly enhanced names of the classmates who came before them in line. Because my name starts with a J, I have always hated this game, because jazzy doesn’t have anything to do with me. They are cheesy. The icebreaker I have been subjected to most often is the “Name Game,” where you have to add a word to your name that starts with the same letter as your name AND tells something about you.I’m annoyed just writing about it, and I repeat: No one really gets to know anyone. Unless of course you force creativity on them by insisting that no animals can be repeated, thereby making the poor kids try to come up with some stinking animal that somehow represents the least embarrassing aspect of their personality and isn’t a repeat of anyone else’s animal. They don’t actually facilitate familiarity. Too many icebreakers consist of questions like this: “If you could be an animal, what animal would you be?” Unless you have a ridiculously deep and creative kid who is going to say something like, “I would be a mongoose, because a mongoose can kill venomous snakes, and I have a way of standing up to bullies even though I’m small,” you’re mostly going to get a lot of cat-cat-dog-dog-fish, et cetera.The result? No one really gets to know anyone. So what many students ultimately do is share something safe and boring, something like “I like soccer,” just so the game moves on to the next person. But to most kids-especially once they get into the middle and high school range-being different is the worst thing you can be. For the icebreaker to actually work, students would need to share something interesting and different about themselves, something that makes them stand out. So many of the icebreakers I found asked students to publicly share some kind of personal information. They require students to take massive social risks with people they barely know.The problem is that so many of the ones I’ve found are problematic for one of these reasons: I would scour the Internet for the very best activities and games and store links to them here for your reference. I planned to create a nice big post with dozens of icebreaker ideas you could choose from. It’s essential to start building relationships with your students right from the start.Īnd how to accomplish this? Icebreakers. That means a new batch of students to get to know, students who need to be made comfortable in your classroom, and who need to get to know each other. We’re coming up fast on the beginning of another school year.
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