ICE
BREAKERS
ADVERB GAME
EVOLUTION GAME
FLYING ACRONYM
HAND SHAKE GAME
HUMAN TWISTER
MUSICAL ANIMAL ACTS
TALK IT OUT
WHAT’S IN YOUR MILK?
WHAT’S MY NAME AGAIN?
BING BANG BUZZ
EXTREME HANGMAN
GRAB A HAND
HICKEY PICKET HOKEY POKEY DOO DAD
PARTY QUIRKS
WHAT IF?
WILL YOU PLEASE, PLEASE SMILE?
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Adverb Game
Objective:
To build students’ observation and acting skills. Students must guess the
adverb that others will model in various situations.
Materials:
None needed!
Procedure:
1. Send one volunteer outside of the room.
2. The people remaining in the room decide on an adverb, for example,
quickly, nervously, happily.
3. Have an FMP call the student back in. The students must guess what
adverb the class thought of by asking the students to do something
“that way.” For example, a student would ask someone to “shake my
hand that way.” If someone the volunteer picks does not want to do
the action, he or she must say, “I don’t want to,” but in the way of the
adverb.
4. The volunteer can ask for up to ten actions, but after each command
the volunteer must guess the adverb. When he or she gets it right,
another volunteer is sent out into the hallway.
Helpful Hints:
Try to choose simple adverbs that are easily applied to basic actions.
By Namrata Kodali
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Evolution Game
Objective:
Promote communication, interaction, cooperation, and fun!
Procedure:
1. Describe five stages of the evolution process and their stances.
a. EGG – curling on floor
b. CHICKEN – squatting on floor like a chicken
c. MONKEY – hunched over with hands under armpits
d. HUMAN – standing up straight
e. SUPER HUMAN – standing on tip toes with hands in the air
2. Every person starts out as an egg. Every egg finds a partner and plays
Rock, Scissor, Paper with the person. The winner advances to the
next stage. The loser goes down to the next earlier stage (chicken
becomes an egg, super human becomes a human, etc) if you are an
egg and you lose, you remain an egg.
3. The winner is either the first person to become a super human OR
person who remains a super human the longest OR everyone who is a
super human at a certain time in the game.
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Flying Acronym
Objective:
Get students thinking and laughing.
Materials:
List of words.
Procedure:
1. Have a list of 15-20 simple words. Write one word on the chalkboard.
2. The students go around the room and make the word into an acronym.
3. If the word was CALL, they might do Cool Alligators Live Long.
Helpful Hints:
The quicker the pace, the more fun it is.
By Lindsey Diamond
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Hand Shake Game
Objective:
To promote communication, interaction, cooperation, and fun!
Procedure:
1. Teach students four handshakes.
a. LATTE HANDSHAKE – Hold pretend coffee cup in the left
hand and grab partner’s right foot with your right hand.
b. COWBOY HANDSHAKE – Make pretend shooting gesture
with both hands, then high five your partner.
c. FISH HANDSHAKE – Place hand on top of partner’s hand
and make a fish gesture.
d. LUMBERJACK HANDSHAKE – Make a fist with thumb
pointing up, have partner grab your thumb and make his own
fist with his thumb up. You grab his thumb with your other
hand and make a fist with your thumb up. Finally, your
partner grabs your thumb and makes a fist. Then move hands
back and forth as if you were sawing a tree.
2. Pick a different partner for every handshake.
3. Leader yells out specific handshake and you find your partner and do
the appropriate handshake.
4. You can make up your own handshakes (which might be better
considering the descriptions I gave for each one.) The students can
also make up their own handshakes.
5. You can continue to do this activity all year by yelling out a
handshake during Advisory and having the students find their
partners and doing the handshake.
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Human Twister
Objective:
To get to know and be familiar with others.
Materials:
None needed!
Procedure:
1. Have everyone stand up in the center of the classroom.
2. Have the advisors yell out different colors. The students must use any
of their body parts to make physical contact with another person
wearing that color.
3. The advisors should continue saying different colors, and the students
must maintain contact with the original partners while forming new
contacts. Students cannot touch anyone else twice.
BE SURE TO MENTION BEFORE THE GAME: “TOUCH IN
APPROPRIATE PLACES ONLY!”
Eleni Kartsimas ‘02
Spencer Zirkelbach ‘02
Lindsay Karlin ‘01
Amy Roesnthal ‘01
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Musical Animal Acts
Objective:
Walk/Dance to the best of the music and when the music stops, try to find a
chair. The person who does not have a chair to sit in must draw from a hat
an animal and act it out for the rest of the sitting members, who must guess
the animal.
Materials Needed:
Chairs (one fewer than the number of people playing,) music, and a hat with
about 20 different animals on slips of paper.
Procedure:
1. Set up one fewer chair than the number of freshman in your advisory.
2. Start the music and have the players walk in a circle around the hairs,
until you stop the music (like Musical Chairs.)
3. When the music stops, each participant tries to sit in one of the chairs;
the player left standing must pull the name of an animal, written on a
piece of paper, out of a hat.
4. Then, they must act it out while the other guests try to guess what the
animal is.
5. Start the music again and repeat the game until all the animals in the
hat have been acted out.
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Talk It Out
Objective:
To be the last person talking.
Materials:
None.
Procedure:
1. Having two volunteers come up to the front of the class first.
2. The FMP’s will give them a scenario. For example, one student might
be Santa and the other Mrs. Claus, or Mickey and Minnie Mouse.
3. They have to talk in only questions.
4. Whoever lasts longer stays up a new person takes the other spot. The
FMP’s can change the scenario depending on how long it’s been
going on.
Helpful Hints:
If a topic is too hard, switch it.
By Laura Moschel ‘09
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What’s In Your Milk?
Objective:
To break the ice in advisory.
Materials:
None needed!
Procedure:
1. Start by asking anyone the question, “What’s in your milk.”
2. That person (Person A) answers with a one word answer, it can be
anything at all (i.e. – a cow)
3. Everyone takes turns asking Person A any questions they want.
4. Person A must answer “a cow” (or whatever else there word was) to
every question with a straight face. The goal for the people asking the
questions is to make Person A crack up or smile.
5. Whoever “breaks” Person A gets to choose the next person to ask
“What’s in your milk?”
Helpful Hints:
Make it clear that these questions are supposed to be funny: the more
enthusiastic the freshmen are, the more fun the game is. Also, encourage
funny answers to the “What’s in your milk?” question.
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What’s My Name Again?
Objective:
Talk to each other and use true and false questions.
Materials:
Enough index cards for the whole class with famous people on them. Clear
the desks out of the way.
Procedure:
1. Tape names on the back of every student.
2. Do not let the students know what’s on the card.
3. They can ask questions of each other in true/false style to figure out
who they are.
4. Once they find out, they can take their seats.
Helpful Hints:
You could also use random objects such as watermelon.
Sydney May
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Bing Bang Buzz
Objective:
To have teams unify and count to 50.
Materials:
None.
Procedure:
1. Split up the class into teams of 5.
2. Have each team sit in a circle and each person says a number.
3. Count consecutively but if the number has a 7 in it or is a multiple of
7, the person say BUZZ. Continue counting until a person says the
number instead of BUZZ or they reach 50.
4. Once the team reaches 50, add in numbers with 5’s or multiples of 5,
this is BANG. If a word has both 5 and 7 in it, then it’s BANDBUZZ.
5. If they reach 50 again, add in 3’s, BING. So if they have a 3 and 7,
it’s BING-BUZZ, and if it has 3 and 5, it’s BING-BANG. And if it
has all three, it’s BING-BANG-BUZZ.
Helpful Hints:
This might take more than one day, because it’s very difficult.
Amy Rosenthal ‘02
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Extreme Hangman
Objective:
Complete 3 hangmen and discover what they have in common.
Materials:
None.
Procedure:
1. Separate the advisory into 2 teams.
2. Make three separate hangman outlines next to each other on the board.
3. Play the three games at the same time.
4. To solve the puzzle, the team must know the answer to all 3 and find
the connection among them.
5. There is one point for solving all 3, and one point to find what they
have in common.
Helpful Hints:
Have topics already prepared. Pop culture is an easy topic to stick to, for
example, have 3 movies that all had the same actor in it.
Emma Schultz ‘08
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Grab A Hand
Objective:
To have fun!
Materials:
One chair for every player of the game.
Procedure:
1. Have all the students sit in co-ed order in a circle of chairs.
2. One boy and one girl will be standing in the middle.
3. All the other students will be sitting in their chairs with their right
elbow connected to their knee. (This forces them to be leaning
forward a little bit and reachable to the players in the middle.)
4. When the leader says, “Go,” the two in the middle must run to a
person of the opposite gender and grab their hand to pull them to a
standing position. They have now just swapped positions.
5. This continues at a fast pace with the constant switching of the person
in the middle.
6. When the leader yells, “Stop,” everyone who is still standing in the
middle must remain there and freeze. The leader will then count how
many boys or how many girls are standing at that point and if there
are more girls, the boys win and vice versa.
7. After each short round, we will ask one more boy and one more girl to
come into the middle, along with whomever is still left in the middle,
and begin a new round. So each round there should be more and more
people in the middle.
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Hickey Pickey Hokey Pokey Doo Dad
Objective:
To help the freshman remember names in advisory.
Materials:
None needed!
Procedure:
1. Players stand or sit in a circle with one player in the center. The
player in the center points his finger at some person and says “Hickey
pickey hokey pokey doo dad.”
2. Before he/she has finished saying this, the player to whom he/she is
pointing must call out the name of the player to his right.
3. If he/she does not, he/she becomes IT. In a large group, several
people may be in the center.
4. Keep the game moving rapidly!
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Party Quirks
Objective:
Have fun and get people out of their comfort zone.
Materials:
None.
Procedure:
1. Pick one student to be the “host” of the party and send them into the
hall.
2. Pick three or so students to be “guests” of the party and the class will
give them personalities to play, whether it be Paris Hilton or a security
guard whose museum is under attack.
3. Have the host come back in and one by one the guests will come to
the party acting in his/her new personality.
4. When the host feels he/she knows who the guests are, they can guess
whenever they feel like it. If they’re correct, the guest leaves the
party.
Helpful Hints:
Make the personalities funny, but not impossible to guess. If the host is
stumped, have another class member give them a hint.
Taryn Nickow ‘09
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What If?
Objective:
To break the ice among the freshman.
Materials:
Small pieces of paper, writing utensils.
Procedure:
1. Give each participant a small piece of paper. Ask them to write a
“What if” questions, such as, “What if the sky was purple?” or “What
if we all had three arm?”
2. When everyone has completed their question (encourage them to
work quickly,) ask them to pass their question to the person on their
right. Next, each person writes the answer to the question they’ve
received. They should answer the question as if they had written it.
For example, if Tom hands his question (“What if I won the lottery?”)
to Susan, she should answer the question as if she had won the lottery,
not Tom.
3. When everyone has written their answer, select someone to read
ONLY the question they have in front of them. Ask the person to
their right to read the ANSWER to their question. They should then
read the question on their paper and the person to their right reads the
answer, etc. Even though the questions and answers are unrelated,
you’ll find some hilarious combinations!
Helpful Hints:
Make sure everyone participated! If there are no volunteers, select freshmen
to get the activity started – the more fun it gets, the more freshmen will want
to participate.
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“Will You Please, Please Smile?”
Objective:
Don’t smile!
Materials:
None.
Procedure:
1. Begin with a volunteer, who will walk around the room trying to get
people to smile while saying however they like, “Honey, if you love
me, will you please, please smile?”
2. They can do whatever they want to the person to make them smile.
3. The other person must say, “Honey, I love you, but I just can’t smile,”
without smiling or laughing. If they do, then they have to find
someone else to make smile.
Helpful Hints:
Play this later in the year when the students are comfortable with each other.
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