First Day of School: Icebreaker Bingo
It is Back To School season, and that means many teachers are looking for a creative way to introduce a room of rambunctious students to each other. I’ve got a personal favorite: Icebreaker Bingo.
What you need:
- One set of bingo cards (one per student) with facts about them. I like to play with activities they might have done over summer vacation, since that is a low-stress way to get students talking without saying “Introduce yourself”. The cards contain statements like “I went to the library” or “I went out to visit my grandparents”.
- Your class list.
How to play:
- Explain the rules to the students.
- Randomly call each student from your class list, and ask them to stand up, say their name, and say what the most fun thing they did over summer vacation was.
- The students should mark down the name of any student who did one of the activities on their card, in the box for that activity. For example, if Dan says “Well, the most fun thing I did this summer was to go visit grandma in Hawaii”, then students can write Dan under the “I went out of town” and “I went to visit my grandparents” boxes.
- When a student fills 5 boxes in any row, diagonal, or column, they should stand up and say BINGO. But they have to be able to say which of their classmates did what in order to win.
- Keep playing until everyone has been introduced.
A variation on this is to write the student’s names on the bingo cards. This makes students keenly interested to hear the names of their classmates, at least at the beginning, but it can get disruptive of self introductions and be a bit intimidating for shy students. Still, it is a fun activity for teachers with strong classroom management skills.
If you have any favorite activities, I’d love to hear them!
