No Shhing Here

As an introvert, I'm not a giant fan of icebreaker/get to know you activities that require awkward conversations with people you don't know. I'm not the only one - plenty of students feel the same way! Last year I came up with a beginning of school activity that introduces content, allows me to learn about each student, and begins to establish classroom community connections— AND it's cringe free! :) Our kids really enjoy this activity - there's lots of opportunity to be creative and it's culturally relevant with its video game tie-in. No Cringe Icebreakers In this activity, You: The Video Game , students share the things that make them unique and learn about their classmates' lives, but there's no uncomfortable conversations. Instead, students pretend their lives have been turned into a video game. They create a "screenshot" of their imaginary video game that includes 10 symbols, and write a bit of text to explain the meaning behind each symbo...

Dicebreakers activities, like the one below, are a great way to integrate student voice and student choice into community-building activities.  I designed a dice board with two rows -- students roll two dice -- they can use either number horizontally or vertically, giving them two possible questions to pick from for each turn. This gives students an element of choice. If you want to simplify, or you don't have enough dice to provide each group with two, you could always eliminate the top row, and just have 1 option for each number.  If you'd like a copy, you can access the Google Doc here . To edit, go to File --> Make a copy.