Five ice breaker ideas for your next lesson

Effective tutoring is all about starting off your lessons right, setting the tone each week and making sure your students feel comfortable and ready to learn. This is easier said than done - students often come in distracted or low energy and this can vary from day to day. In addition to this, students might feel unenthusiastic about your subject, which puts up an immediate block.

It can be challenging to create an engaging environment straight off the bat, especially with new students and in one-to-one scenarios. Short and snappy ice breaker activities can help to raise energy, capture attention and even provide an opportunity to tailor a section of your lesson to their personalities and interests - they don’t even need to be related to your subject!

With the right combination of activities, you can ensure your students are fully engaged and prepared for your lesson.

Here are five of our favourite ice breaker ideas for your next lesson: 

1) A NUMBERS GAME

Particularly effective for maths-based lessons, this activity can be tailored to work across other subjects and provides space for creative and critical thinking. Write down a selection of seemingly random numbers (three is usually fine) and ask your students to work out how they relate to you. One number might be your birthday, house number, or the number of siblings you have, for example. Or, you can choose numbers that all have something in common, which can relate to a previous class.

2) WHEEL OF QUESTIONS

This can work well with younger students, but you can adapt it to all age groups. Using a free platform like Spin the Wheel, you can create a fun, fast-paced warm up activity that will really keep your students engaged (and bring out their competitive side!) You can gamify your wheel to create a quiz, covering material from previous lessons, or make it more of an open discussion, asking students for their opinions on a specific topic.

3) TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE (with a twist!)

A classic but failsafe option, whether you’re tutoring a group or individual students! Adding a twist to the game can keep it fresh. Instead of the typical format, encourage students to write two lies and one truth. If you’re tutoring a group, ask your students to write anonymous facts (either about themselves if it’s their first session, or related with the topic of the lesson) and put them into a pot. Students can then pull facts out and try to guess who has written each one and whether it’s true or false - they can bluff if it’s their own! 

For one-to-one lessons, you can adapt this by giving your student two truths and a lie about the theme of the lesson, challenging them to guess which fact is incorrect. You could also challenge them to come up with their own, to see how much knowledge they already have on the topic.

4) FACTS PASS

Another great ice-breaker for maths classes that can be adapted for other subjects. Whether or not it’s your first class, introduce your name and then a number and one of its features (for example “17 - prime number”). The next person has to say a number which shares the feature of yours. If a student isn’t able to think of a relevant number, they can introduce a new number and feature to continue the game.

This activity can be tailored to other subjects (for example, grammar points in an English lesson, or elements of the Periodic Table which share common properties in a chemistry lesson). It works best in a group but you can use it in one-to-one classes and bounce the facts back and forth between you and your student. 

5) TUTTI FRUTTI

Also known as Scattegories, this fun, often raucous game can work with students of all ages! Simply make a list of topics - if it’s your first lesson with a student or group, this can be random, then later you can tailor your topics to relate to your lessons specifically. Give your students a letter of the alphabet and see how long it takes for them to find a word or phrase for each category starting with that letter. 

Students can take turns in coming up with their own categories and can judge each others’ answers to see if they deserve points!

While there are hundreds of ways to get your students engaged, these are some of our favourites, which can be adapted for age group, group size and subject matter. For more tips on how to maximise your lessons, keep an eye on our blog or get in touch here to find out about volunteer tutoring opportunities. Happy ice breaking!