For me, and for many teachers I know, probably the most difficult lessons are the first one with a new group or the first ones with our old groups after the different breaks, i.e. the summer, the Christmas and the Easter breaks. I’ve realized that if I simply ask them the question: “What did you do in the break?”, from most of my students I’ll get just very simple answers, basically the following ones: “Nothing.”; “I relaxed.”; “I played computer games.”
If you’ve read some methodology books, you’ll find good ideas for ice-breakers and rule settlers with new groups. However, I think you have to be really creative for the back-to-school games for those very first lessons if you want to have real communications with your groups. Here are some ideas to help you with what I’ve tried, and I think they work pretty well.
Detective game 1:
Age group: any
Level: A2-C2
Time: depending on the number of students, 30-40 minutes
Everyone loves a good mystery – or almost everyone. Why shouldn’t you try it with your class?
After the Christmas break, you can investigate the most exciting parts of their breaks. Ask your students to finish the following two sentences:
- The most special present I got was …
- My best memory is when …
They can either write their sentences on little pieces of paper, or if you have internet access and a projector, and your students have their mobile phones on them, they can send their answers into e.g. mentimeter.
With the little pieces, you can hand out the slips at random and the students have to find the person who wrote those things by asking questions. If you want to make it a longer activity, your students can write their sentences on two different slips, so in the mingling part they have to find two different students.
If you choose the menti version, the whole group can investigate the cases together. Again, they can mingle and see who the most successful detectives are by finding the most matches, within a set time limit.
After your students have finished their investigation, you can have some follow-up questions based on the information shared by your students. This was the Christmas version, but you can change your starting sentences depending on which break you’ve just come back from.
Detective game 2:
Age group: any
Level: A2-C2
Time: about 40 minutes
This game is most fun after the summer break if you had the chance to travel somewhere nice and exciting. You have to write a postcard to your students but leave out some pieces of information, basically the name of the country or places you visited, and some other things. As I can always use a projector, I created a ppt task the following way:
If you do it this way, you can add a little story with your instructions: “I was sitting in a café when I was writing this postcard to you, but you know how clumsy I am and I accidentally spilt some coffee on it. Can you find out what words are hidden underneath my coffee stains?” This is where being a detective comes into the task: based on the given information and some pictures to go with, they have to find out where I was during the break and what I did.
After discussing their ideas, I showed them some pictures of my break and asked them to guess what I was doing when I took these pictures. Finally, I shared those memories with them.
Based on my example postcard, in the end I asked my students to write a similar postcard to their friends, leaving out some important facts. Then they worked in groups of four and had to find out the missing information. As an extra task, the most enthusiastic students created short ppts with their photos and talked about their summer memories in the next lesson.
Detective game 3:
Age group: any
Level: A2-C2
Time: about 15 minutes
You can find an example of an online version of the above game by clicking on the following links. The first is a matching game where they have to match my pictures with the place names. This will come really useful in the second task, where they have to complete a text using what they learnt in the first task.