Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Icebreaker: People Bingo

Next to "People Recipe Cards," "People Bingo" is one of my favorite icebreaker activities. Generally, I even enjoy partaking in the activity myself because it can lead to some interesting conversation about sometimes quirky things.

For those that are unfamiliar with the icebreaker, you start with a blank "game board" (I usually do 5x5 on a normal letter-sized sheet of paper) and fill in each of the squares with a trait or fact that a person may have or relate to such as "Likes to dance" or "Has a little sibling." It proved to be simple to come up with half of the board, but by the time I was on my last 5 squares, I was trying pretty hard to come up with things that the students could relate to (you can also include squares that only apply to you -- I put in "Is a college student" just so that some of the kids would be forced to come up to me if they wished to fill up their board).

As you create your game board, make sure to keep some white space below the "trait" so that the players have enough room to write names down.

To begin the icebreaker, give each student a game board (you can participate yourself, too) and tell them that they need to find someone who fulfills one of the squares (so, if a student approached me with their board, I would tell them that I was a college student and sign my name in the box). You can either play using normal "Bingo" rules (5 boxes vertically/horizontally across or 5 boxes diagonally) or challenge them to try to fill up as many boxes as possible without repeating names (works really well with larger groups and some may realize that they need to strategize in order to fill up all of the boxes).

When the activity was over, I asked a couple of students to introduce someone that was on their board and the fact about them.

I felt like the activity was pretty well received by the students... plus it let them shed some of that pent up energy from a full day of school by walking around.

More to come soon!

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