Icebreaker Activities and Questions

ByRichard Byrne

Getting to know our new students and helping them get to know each other is such an important part of starting the new school year on the right foot that I’m always interested in learning how other teachers do it. I have a few ideas to share with you this week, but I hope you’ll reply and share some of your ideas with me.

The Wheel of Random Icebreaker Questions

For years I’ve used Flippity’s Random Name Picker template for calling on students. It can also be used to generate a wheel of random questions and discussion prompts. Here’s a wheel of random icebreaker questions that I created by using Flippity. You can make a similar one by following the directions in this two-minute video.

These are the questions I used in my wheel of random icebreaker questions.

  • Would you rather be too hot or too cold?
  • Where would you go if I gave you a free plane ticket today?
  • Tell a story about the third picture in your phone.
  • Do you put your shoes on in the same order every day?
  • What’s the best way to start your day?
  • Coffee or tea?
  • Ice cream or popsicle?
  • Football or soccer?
  • Right handed or left handed?
  • Who was the last person you talked to before coming into this room?
  • Would you rather be able to fly or be invisible?
  • What did you do for fun last Saturday?
  • Would you rather fly or drive 1,000 miles?
  • How many countries can you name?
  • What’s the best way to get to Carnegie Hall?

Canva Icebreaker Game Templates

Canva has more than 300 game templates. There are templates in that collection for trivia games, icebreaker games, puzzle games, and much more. You can use the templates as written, but you’ll probably want to modify them to better fit your needs. Here’s a video I made about using Canva’s game templates.

Virtual Travel Icebreakers

A question I’ve often asked my students is “where in the world would you go if you could go anywhere today?” Last fall I used that question as a prompt for an activity in which students learn a bit about Google Drawings while sharing a bit about themselves.

The idea is to have students virtually place themselves anywhere in the world through the use of Google Drawings. To do this students first need to find a picture of themselves and remove the background from it. Photoscissors makes it quick and easy to remove the background then download a new background-free image. Once they have a picture of themselves then students open Google Drawings where they insert a picture of a place that they want to visit or revisit. Finally, they then insert their profile picture over the background image in Google Drawings. Those steps might sound complicated, but they’re not. In this short video I show the whole process.

50 Ideas for Short Workshops

50 Tech Tuesday Tips is an eBook that I created with busy tech coaches, tech integrators, and media specialists in mind. In it you’ll find 50 ideas and tutorials that you can use as the basis of your own short PD sessions. Get a copy today!