It wouldn’t be Back-to-School without some fun icebreaker activities! But with a twist, of course.
Whether you teach elementary, middle school or high school, your learners will love these icebreaker games in Kami.
With tools like Video and Voice Comments, Add Media and Feature Control, Kami makes icebreakers more collaborative, interactive and personalized.
Classroom icebreakers are a fun way to encourage team building at the start of the school year. They’re also a great way to get everyone interacting and learning about each other on the very first day of class. Why not try out two truths and a lie, this or that, or would you rather? Jump into the Kami Library to get your free templates like bingo cards or a scavenger hunt.
These five, fun icebreakers will make the first day of school easy peasy.
Hey fam, I’m Sophie, your Teacher Success Champion. I’m also a former teacher and instructional tech coach. So naturally, I love helping out my people, you, teachers. In this tutorial I’m going to show you five icebreaker activities and how you can build connections with your students using Kami tools. First, I’m going to draw your attention to the various Meet The Teacher templates where you could start the year off right, with an authentic introduction of yourself. When you find your favorite, you can open it directly into Kami. Here we go. So I inserted a picture here, and all you need to do is to go to Add Media. And this picture was on my computer, find that picture and click open, it will follow your mouse and then you click to place it. You can also rotate it 90 degrees and use the crop button if it’s too much. You can also resize. And if it’s not what you want, trash it. You can use the textbox tool to type your name like I did here. Click on the Text Box tool, you can change your font size, and your desired color with your default color picker. If your color that you want isn’t there, you can click on more colors and edit your nine colors from the swatches or the color picker. Once you’re ready to go, you just click on the page and start typing. If it’s not in the right location, you can move it around, rotate it 90 degrees, save it to your annotation bank, have it read to you or just trash it. What’s awesome about these is you can even have your name spoken to you using the comment tool. So you go over to the comment tool. And you can do your voice comment, click it on the page, and it will start recording immediately. I have already recorded my name so that you can hear it here.
Please call me Mrs. Jones.
For this one, I want to comment video, place the dot there and it started recording my video.
Just in case they’re absent the day you distribute this.
When your masterpiece is complete, share it with our sharing options or post it in your LMS. You can encourage authenticity from your students to with our all about me students. And let’s head on over to the Kami Library and search: All About Me. This one’s one of my favorites, you can open it directly into Kami for this activity, sharing it so that each student gets their own copy is key. Let me show you. So we’re going to share it out, we’re going to create an individual copy for each student. And we’re going to use the Control Features button to minimize the options that the students have. If you don’t want them copying and pasting anything from the internet, you can turn that off, maybe they’ll need to use the read aloud so that a words can be read to them. The comments for text, voice, video or screen capture would be perfect to allow them to have, maybe the you want them to actually use their voice though, so you can turn off the text and the screen capture since you want to see them. And in this case for Add Media, I’ve unselected the YouTube graphic organizers and stickers because they don’t need that. Here you can even remember your options so that you don’t have to keep selecting these options over and over again and click OK. Now when you share this link, the students will only have available to them those features that you have selected. Students will not even need to refresh. Their toolbar on the side will change automatically. Intentional icebreakers or even time fillers are a great way to start building a classroom community. It can be as simple as typing Kami.new in your web browser. Insert the T chart graphic organizer by going over to Add Media, graphic organizers and clicking on the T chart you’re going to click to drop it on the page. With the Textbox tool you can tie would you rather this share it out so that everyone is the editor. You can even control your features again, so you can turn everything off and only allow them to have a textbox. When they open up this document they will only have available to them their textbox to type their name. Once everyone is on the dock then as students would you rather questions for them to move their pieces on the collaborative Kami doc. Another take on building community and getting to know each other, is to play Two Truths and a fib. Watch all set this one up. Head back over to the Kami Library and find our ready to go template. Add it to your split and merge drawer. Open it in Split and Merge and clone it so that there are enough pages for each student and you to get their own.
Then, bring it back into Kami to add your part and then share it out. When your students arrive, assign each their own page or students can claim a page with the Textbox tool and their name. The goal is for each student to type three things that seem true, but one is actually false. Once complete, the class votes on which truths are actually fibs. Don’t forget to talk about them and laugh together. Laughter knits up for community. One last activity to help encourage student authenticity and to build a strong student teacher relationship is to check in with your students. This Good, Okay, Bad template is great for whole group quick checks. Students can place a dot in the column for how they are feeling. You can easily see who might need some special care by hovering over the dot. Their initials first pop up and then if you hover over their initials, their name will pop up. This Today I am grateful for template is a cute check in option where students can use the highlighter to mark how they’re feeling. Now head on over to the Kami Library to get inspired to break the ice with your students. Bye