Mingles: 3. Signatures
Mingles: 3. Signatures
Mingles: 3. Signatures
Signatures
Mingles
4. Classmate bingo
An oldie but a goodie. Create bingo cards with prompts for students to use to
ask each other questions. The idea is to cross off all the squares. Use simple
prompts like those below, or try more complicated ones for higher level
classes:
Tip: This is a great way for teachers to give information about themselves on
the first day of class. Ask students to think of follow-up questions in pairs.
Give each student a small handful of colored candy (such as Skittles). Tell the
class that a question has been assigned to each candy color. Write these on
the board, considering having a mix of serious and more humorous questions
such as:
Students are then told to eat all their candy – except for one piece. In this way
they can choose the question they will answer.
With the class in a circle the teacher asks a series of quirky yes/no questions.
Students sit down if they can answer “yes” and the last student standing is the
winner.
Write a discussion topic on the board (for example, food, pets, social media, or
dating) and then start passing a ball or “hot potato” from student to student. As
students pass the hot potato around, they must stop when they hear you say the
words positive, negative or crazy.
When you say, “positive,” the student holding the potato must stop and make a
positive statement about the topic. For example, If the topic is food, their statement
might be “My favorite restaurant is Ichiban Sushi.”
If you say, “negative,” they must make a negative statement about the topic, e.g.
“I’ve never eaten Chinese food!”
And, if you say, “crazy,” the sentence they create can be anything they like, such as
“One time I ate a whole pizza myself!”
he Hot Seat
Put a chair at the front of the room with its back facing the board; this is the Hot Seat
and a student volunteer must sit here. Then, write a word on the board (for
beginners, tell them the category or theme of words, such as jobs or food – ideally
vocabulary they are already studying). Then, the other students try to prompt the hot-
seater into guessing what the word is by describing it without saying the actual word
(fun with famous people too!).
For example, if you’ve told your beginner class the category is fruit and the word on
the board is pineapple, the students can say things like:
It has spines.
With guessing games like this one, students are really enthusiastic about trying to
get their peers to guess correctly and win the game. The desire to guess takes over,
and formerly reserved students forget that they were ever afraid to speak up in
English.
This is an easy ESL icebreaker to incorporate on the first day of class (or later on if
you feel students could get to know one another better). A benefit of this activity is
that it removes the pressure of students introducing themselves at the start of class,
which can sometimes cause stress for new students.
Simply break students into pairs and have them interview one another. To help
students get started, give them a list of things to find out about their partner, such as
where they’re from, how many siblings they have, or what their summer plans are for
the upcoming year. Then, they will introduce their partners to the rest of the class.
Ask your student(s) to bring a meaningful object to class and share the story behind
it with you and/or their classmates. If your student is a beginner, you can have them
describe their object instead. E.g., “It is purple. It is big.” If you only have one
student, consider asking them to bring in two or three objects total.
To get students comfortable with speaking and sharing, demonstrate the activity with
an object of your own first.
Instructions
1. Ask a participant to pick one random object that is in their room and not
tell anyone what it is.
2. Explain that the other participants will have to guess what it is, by
asking questions that require a yes or no answer.
You could use a chat board for this, but it is not necessary. You could
just run the activity by speaking and maybe use a virtual board to record the
scores. You can also, if you wish to, make it a competition, whereby the
participant who correctly guesses the most objects wins.
16. ‘Accomplished Goals’ Online Group Activity
This is a good activity to focus on positive things (i.e. people’s achievements).
It is also a networking tool, as participants could be interested in achieving the
same goal that another person in the group has achieved and whom they
might ask for advice from.
Instructions:
1. Ask participants to say what goal they have achieved in the last year (it
does not matter how small)
2. Discuss. You could facilitate the discussion by asking a question such
as how they felt when they achieved the goal or what skills do they think were
important in achieving the goal.
3. You could post a list of achievements on a chat or virtual board.