Easy warm-up and icebreakers for the ESL classroom

First days of an academic year are often difficult and strange for students and teachers. We usually question ourselves how to start the course and how to attract our students' attention effectively. So today I'm coming with the solution to make these first days an absolute success!

Icebreakers and warm-ups are short activities we can use to start our lessons in a fun way or to change from one activity to another to recapture students' attention. They help us to know a bit more about our students as they are relaxed and they are the perfect tool to build confidence in the oral and interpersonal relations.

FIND SOMEONE WHO...

This is one of the most typical first-day activities. It is perfect if the students do not know their partners and it helps them to talk about themselves a bit which works always perfectly. We have to prepare a worksheet (or download the one attached below) in which we include crazy affirmations and our students have to find some who has or has not done that. According to their level, we can boost the activity with difficult sentences. We should also participate so the students feel more confidents and we give them the chance to know more about us.

Am I ...?

One of the students have to sit in front of the class and the rest will assign them a famous person (we can also do it with animals, colours, or anything we are studying at that moment). The student must guess its name by asking yes/no questions. We can also ask our students to just use specific questions, for example, using gerunds, past tenses, etc.

Positive, negative, question

This activity is perfect to finish a lesson and to revise a topic. We can use a ball or a die and assign a number to each student. With the ball is simplier as its just passing it around. When the teacher says "positive", the student must say a positive sentence about the topic ("education is accessible for everybody"). When we say "negative" the student must say something negative ("religion and politics influence our education") and when we say "question", they have to ask another student about the topic ("what is your favorite subject"). In my opinion, this activity is really successful in higher levels cause it is more dynamic.

Here you have some icebreakers to boost your FL classrooms. I would love to know if you have or use other activities to capture or recapture your students' attention :)