Ice breaker Speaking Activity
Do you want to help your students remember each other’s names? Here’s a simple activity for doing this. It’s challenging, a little bit competitive and quite effective!
How to Do the Name Game
Skills: Speaking/ Listening
Time: 10-15 minutes
Level: Beginner-Advanced
Materials Required: Nothing
Age: Children
A way that you can get your students to remember names (and you too!) is to do this simple ice breaker speaking activity.
Go around the class, and have students say, “My name is ______and I like _______.” The next student repeats the previous ones, and adds their own.
It goes on until it finally gets to you and you can impress the students with your memorization abilities! It works best for smaller classes of less than 10.
For more advanced students, you can choose something more difficult than “I like,” such as “My name is _________ and last weekend, I __________.” Besides remembering names, you can also use this activity to work on regular/irregular verbs.
Useful for Teaching Basic Grammar or Vocabulary Too
You can always use this memory circle kind of activity for helping students practice new grammar points, or remembering vocabulary words.
For example, if you just did a unit about animals, you could have each student choose an animal and go around the circle saying, “I like tigers, he likes elephants, and she likes cats.”
This also covers subject-verb agreement (I like, she likes).
As you can see, it works much better for beginner students than higher-level ones.
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Have your Say about this Ice Breaker Speaking Activity!
What’s your favourite way to help your students remember each other’s names? Leave a comment below and let us know what you think.
