Conversation starter cards make a great ice breaker teachers can use in the classroom. Not only can you use this type of activity during back to school, it works well after the long December break to kick off the new year. It is even something I can do if I have a new student.
Create a handful of funny questions and prompts to kick off conversation in your classroom. Print the conversation starter questions and prompts on cardstock paper and cut into roughly a business card size (~2″ x 4″). Put the stack of cards at a center in your classroom, at a cluster of student desks, or distribute them during your lunch period. Adding conversation cards to lunch tables encourages students to interact with peers. We assign lunch seats at our school and often students are reluctant to talk to a lunch buddy if it is someone they do not know well. Conversation prompts at the table encourages students to chat with someone different.
I got the idea for a conversation kick off activity over the holidays. Our family opened Christmas crackers at a group dinner. When we popped the Christmas crackers, they had small papers in them with trivia questions and conversation prompts. The questions worked well for a group of mixed ages and kept everyone at the table engaged. You can create all kinds of prompts depending on the age of your student. Visit THIS BLOG POST for a set of conversation starter cards that work well for middle school and high school students.
Using Conversation Starter Cards at School
Another option for using this conversation starter idea at school, is to create a page of “Would you rather…” questions. We used this activity for a big/little mentor program we have at our school. Older grades are paired with students in younger grades. Our sixth graders met with their second grade “littles” and asked a series of questions and recorded all responses. Students polled a handful of students until they completed the question chart. After all the responses were tallied, the students incorporated math skills by creating a bar graph to determine the most popular answers. To download the Would You Rather printable, visit my ORIGINAL BLOG POST HERE.
Conversation starter cards are a great ice breaker for the first week of school to begin building a community in your classroom. Or, use the ice breakers after a long break like the December holidays as a fun way to ease students back into the school routine.
Another fun activity that gets students talking to each other is this TRADING CARD PARTY activity!
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