(upbeat music)
- In this video, I'm going to show a sample
first day icebreaker task in five steps.
Hello teachers, my name is Wayne Walker
I'm one of the instructors at International TEFL Academy.
(soft slow music)
What do you wanna do on your first day of class?
Of course, you wanna introduce yourself,
and you want to get to know who your learners are.
That's obvious, but there's a lot of different
ways to do that.
You also wanna set the tone, for the classroom.
I want a classroom that is very active,
a classroom that is dynamic,
that is communicative,
that is student centered, and I want it to be energetic.
I'm going to bring energy to the classroom every day,
and I want the learners to know I want
them to bring energy every day.
So I'm gonna explain my first day activity to you today.
And I'm not doing it just to tell you
that you have to do this,
or that you even need to be planning
your first day right now.
But I want to exemplify for you,
what I mean when I say active, dynamic,
communicative, student centered, energetic.
So what I do, I bring in a bag of items.
This is my bag of junk is what I call it.
There's 12 or 13 items in here,
personal items that communicates something about me.
And that's very important.
Everything in here tells you something about me.
So I walk into the classroom, step one of my activity.
Before I say anything,
before I introduce myself or write anything on the board,
I dumped this bag onto the floor.
All of the items, spread them out,
let the learners know I want them to stand up,
I want them to pick up these items.
Let them kind of notice my books, flip through my passport,
my old passport, my new passport.
Look at the family photo, pick up and handle the toys.
Just kind of talk about,
and get to know all of these items
that are there on the floor.
After a few minutes of doing that,
once I sense that everyone has seen all of the items,
I pick all of the items back up
and put them back into the bag,
so that the students can't see them.
And that's kind of the end of step one.
Step two of the activity,
I put the learners into pairs.
So you two, you two, you two.
And I tell those pairs that they have a few minutes
to write down a list of all the items they can remember.
You can almost make it competitive.
Like you have three minutes,
who can write down all of the items that were in that bag.
And this gives them a chance to recall,
to talk to their partner what was there.
I'll let them ask me questions about the vocabulary
or use a dictionary to look up the words.
That's really step two.
In step three,
I'm going to ask each pair of learners to name,
in order name one item that was in the bag.
So I need one group to tell me something
they remember from the bag, this group right here.
What's one item you remember from the bag?
That's right.
So baseball, is actually a baseball glove and a baseball.
And I have those there.
Well, what does this tell you about me?
What do you learn about me?
That you see this.
That's right I love baseball.
Baseball is my favorite sport.
So I gonna write this down here.
So when they name an item that's in the bag,
I'll hold the item up.
And then this is important.
I won't write the name of the item on the board.
I'll write down, I'll ask the learners,
what does this tell you about me?
What do you learn about me from this item?
And I'll write that on the board.
So I'm not the item,
but what they item teaches you about me.
What do you see on the front of my passport?
That's right.
I am American from the United States.
And we'll end up with a list of things
facts about me on the board,
on the right hand side of the board.
And that's kind of step three.
Step four, I then say all of these are answers to questions.
So if with that same partner,
I want you to write down the English language question
that this is an answer to.
So I'm careful to put at the very top
of the board is my name.
It says, Wayne Walker.
I'll do that one with the class.
What's the question we're looking for here.
What is this the answer to, what is your name?
That's correct, I'll write down what is your name.
And impairs I want them to try to write down
the questions that would elicit all of these answers.
And they might struggle with that and that's okay.
This is a good chance for me as a teacher to walk around
and get a sense for how much they're struggling with that.
All right, so we have some information about me here.
And if you couldn't guess you see these here,
these are all answers to questions.
And so now I want to think about what the questions are.
So this first one here, what is this?
This is Wayne Walker is the answer to a question.
Can anyone tell me what that question is?
Yes, what is your name?
Very good, very good.
So you see these other, 40, USA, all of these things.
And we're gonna put these last group
together for one question.
In the same pairs,
I want you to write down the questions
that you think these are the answers to.
At the end of that, I'll ask them to tell me
and I'll write them on the board correctly.
So now we have a list of introductory questions.
What's your name?
Where are you from?
How old are you?
Are you married?
All of these questions.
And the last step of the class
is for them to use these questions,
to walk around and introduce themselves.
I want everyone to stand up.
I want you to find the people you don't know,
ask them all of these questions, answer these questions.
Even if you guys all know each other, I'm gonna mingle,
I'm gonna walk around and be asking
and answering these questions as well.
And so we can do that for 10 minutes, 15 minutes.
If the class is longer,
we still have time to go over a syllabus,
class rules or whatever else, other business we need to do.
But this activity can work from high beginners,
all the way to advanced with some modification.
But I hope you can see that it is a very active activity.
It's a very dynamic activity.
The learners are out of their chairs,
they're talking to each other, they're talking to me,
we're learning about each other.
Most importantly the students are seeing
that my classroom is not a lecture based classroom,
I want them to be excited to come to class,
to do the activities that I'm planning every day.
What are you gonna do on your first day of class?
(upbeat music)