{"id":1552,"date":"2015-08-25T14:04:53","date_gmt":"2015-08-25T20:04:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/?p=1552"},"modified":"2015-08-27T14:07:15","modified_gmt":"2015-08-27T20:07:15","slug":"breaking-the-ice-first-week-activities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/breaking-the-ice-first-week-activities\/","title":{"rendered":"Breaking the Ice: First Week Activities"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome back!\u00a0 We hope this Tip finds you refreshed and ready to start an amazing fall semester.\u00a0 When planning the first week of school, it\u2019s important to include\u00a0activities that allow you to get to know your students.\u00a0\u00a0 Creating a safe and an inclusive learning environment is about getting to know the students and allowing them to get to know each other as well.\u00a0 While you\u2019re learning their names and favorite flavor of ice cream, don\u2019t forget that their classmates are learning this information, too.\u00a0 Sometimes we assume that a school our size means that everyone knows each other.\u00a0 It is true that many of them do know each other, but they do not know each other in the context of your class.\u00a0 To build a community in your\u00a0course, you can try these tips:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Create a student inventory: <\/strong>Jennifer Garrett and Mary Clement state, \u201cWhen creating your interest inventory, you need to consider what you need to know about your students in order to effectively teach them.\u201d For specific suggestions for types of questions to ask your students on the inventory, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.facultyfocus.com\/articles\/effective-teaching-strategies\/first-day-of-class-activity-the-interest-inventory\/\">click here.<\/a><\/li>\n<li><strong>Interviews:<\/strong> Split the class into partners, and have the partners each share about themselves for one minute each.\u00a0 Then have everyone share about what they learned about their partner to the class.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Two truths and a lie<\/strong>: Have students write down 2 truths and 1 lie. Next, you and your class read these 3 ideas about each student and try to figure out which idea is the lie.\u00a0 Continue to do this for each person.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Name game<\/strong>: This icebreaker can be discipline specific. If teaching a Shakespeare course, for example, as the students are saying their names, have them share which Shakespearean character they most relate to.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>For other icebreaker ideas, feel free to visit the Center for Teaching and Learning.\u00a0 If you have an icebreaker idea, you\u2019re welcome to share it in a comment box below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome back!\u00a0 We hope this Tip finds you refreshed and ready to start an amazing fall semester.\u00a0 When planning the first week [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching-tips"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5DI6r-p2","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1552"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1554,"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1552\/revisions\/1554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.principia.edu\/teaching-excellence\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}