For the final icebreaker activity, you can adapt the classic drinking game of Cup Pong for practicing English.
To prepare for the game, you will need a few plastic/paper cups and a ping pong ball. If you don’t have cups, try improvising with some cardboard boxes.
Assign a number and a letter to each cup that you have lined up on the floor (or on a desk). Each number is the amount of points received if a ball lands in the cup. Meanwhile, each letter represents a language task that students must perform.
For instance, if you have five cups, label them from A to E with different point values based on the task difficulty. Below is an example of how you could configure a possible scenario:
- Cup A – Spelling (1 point)
- Cup B – Punctuation (1 point)
- Cup C – Present Tense (2 points)
- Cup D – Past Tense (3 points)
- Cup E – Future Tense (3 points)
In this case, if a student lands their ball in Cup A, then they would have to spell a word. If they spell correctly, they get 1 bonus point. On the other hand, if someone lands their ball in Cup E, then they would have to form a sentence using the future tense. If correct, they would receive 3 bonus points for completing the more challenging task.
The beauty of the Cup Pong icebreaker is that you can adapt the rules and tasks to match your students’ abilities. All in all, it is a fun engaging kinesthetic learning activity for all ages.
Other Fun Icebreaker Activities for Kids and Adults
These three games are just a few ideas that you can use to introduce new students in class. If you would like to learn about other ESL icebreaker activities, visit ESLexpat.com. The site also features extra ESL activities for kids and adults, English idioms and phrases, TESOL blog articles, teacher surveys, and more resources for teaching English abroad.