Product Manager Laura Sigsworth shares her favourite activities for the first day of class.
The first day of class can often be as nerve-wracking for teachers as it is for students, particularly if you have completely new classes of students! Will they be silent and uncommunicative, or rowdy? How will you remember all their names? How will you make the right impression?
Here are some simple ‘getting to know you’ activities to break the ice and get your students speaking.
What’s the question? (all levels)
At the beginning of the class, write a list of 4 or 5 questions about yourself on the board. These can be related to the topic of the lesson, or simple ‘getting to know you’ type questions. Try and make at least 1 of the answers a bit unusual. You can extend this activity by eliciting the questions from the students. Then ask them to write their own answers to questions about themselves, and guess each other’s questions in pairs.
For example:
- What is your name? Miss Laura
- Where are you from? England
- What did you do on your holiday? Rode a camel in Egypt
- Did you enjoy it? Yes, but it was a bit uncomfortable
Guess Who?! (all levels)
Images in your coursebook can be exploited to find out how much relevant language your students already know. On this page here, from THiNK Student Book Level 1 Page 5, you can use the pictures of people to play a game of Guess Who.
Get students to work in pairs. They choose a picture and write an imaginary biography of the person or people. Write questions for them to answer on the board. These can be chosen depending on the topic of the lesson. For example, for lower level learners:
- Where do/does he/she/they live?
- How old is he/she?
- Do they have any brothers or sisters?
- What do they like doing?
Then each pair reads their bio to the class, and the other students guess which person or people they are talking about.