Teachers' toolkit

This is sample from the teaching notes on icebreakers. 

‘School climate is a leading factor in explaining student learning and achievement.’ In their article ‘The Impact of School Climate and School Identification on Academic Achievement’ (Frontiers in Psychology, 2017), Sophie Maxwell et al. discuss the factors influencing a school’s ‘climate’ and the positive impact that a ‘warm’ climate has on teaching and learning.

Icebreakers are an effective way to begin establishing a warm climate in your classroom from day one. On the following pages you’ll find four different templates to help break the ice with a new class, get students interacting and allow you to get to know them better:

• Get to know you bingo. Give each student a bingo card and set them the task of finding a different classmate for each of the descriptors on the card. The first to complete the card wins. You can join in with this activity too to help you and your students get to know each other.

• Personal mandala. The word ‘mandala’ originates from the Sanskrit word for circle. A mandala contains symbols or drawings of people, places and ideas that are central to a person’s life. Using the template provided, invite your students to create and decorate their own personal mandala (there are plenty of examples on the internet that you can project for some inspiration). Students can then share, discuss and display their mandalas as an icebreaker.

• Meet your match. Before your lesson, laminate the ‘Meet your match’ cards (or print them onto card) and cut out the shape halves. At the beginning of the lesson, give each student half a shape. Their task is to find the student with the other half of their shape, thus meeting their match!

• What am I? Give each student a ‘What am I?’ card and ask them to take turns making the noise of the object/person on the card. The first person to correctly guess wins a point. The game continues until everyone in the class has had a turn and the points are totalled. Alternatively, go to YouTube for a version of the game without the cards.