Five Ways To Get To Know New Students

It is the start of the autumn semester – also known as the fall semester for those people from across the pond – here in South Korea. And this always leads me to think of different ways to get to know students in those crucial first lessons.

In this post, I am sharing five of my favourite first lesson activities to help develop that rapport and for learners to get to know you too. Let me know which are your favourite and how you get to know students in those first lessons in the comments.

Activity 1: Find Someone Who

The first lesson activity that I first came across in my higher education was the classic “Find Someone Who” where you try to survey people in your class finding out a little more about them. It was also a first lesson activity which helps learners get to know more about their teacher, if you are actively involved in the survey and you make yourself approachable during the task.

What I would recommend when setting up the task is you demonstrate the activity to the class. You could either invite a student up to the front of the class and then you ask them questions from the survey, such as “Do you love K-Pop?”, “Do you support a European football team?”, etc. Once they answer yes to one of the questions, you could ask them how they spell their name and then write down their name on the worksheet. Afterwards, you could then demonstrate with another student, also writing down their name for a corresponding positive answer.

Once students have a good idea about the structure of the activity from the demonstration, hand out the worksheet to the students and then remind them to ask full questions and to talk to all students in the classroom. Monitor the activity and then at the end of the activity, give students a chance to share anything interesting that they discovered during the task.

Activity 2: Student Survey

The second get to know you activity that you could incorporate into your initial lesson could be in the form of a Student Survey. If you are able to find out a little more about the students prior to them arriving for their first class (perhaps in the form of a pre-class questionnaire), then you will have a little information about them. Once you have some information about each of the students, you could then implement this into Student Survey.

The survey could include a range of topics or ideas, but would focus on “Have you ever …”, and then you can add some of the information that students had provided you with a little information prior to their first class such as “Have you ever met someone famous?”, “Have you ever lived in two countries?”, or “Have you ever played a musical instrument?”.

I have added a template file that you could download, amend, or use in your first lesson should you wish to.

Activity 3: Two Truths and One Lie

This next activity was one of the very first get to know you activities that I was introduced to back in 2007 when I started the CELTA course in Seoul, South Korea. It is a very simple activity where you share three sentences about yourself and students need to decide which of the two sentences are true and which is a lie.

When I was teaching young learners, I would include the following sentences: 1. “I have lived in 6 countries”, 2. “I can read and write Korean”, and 3. “I am 48 years old”. Invariably, students would guess either sentence one or two as a lie but when they learn that sentence three is a lie, they would be surprised. The real surprise comes when they ask me how old I am and I ask them to guess. It does lighten the mood and students start to feel a little more relaxed after this.

I have included this get to know you activity into many of my first lessons and I have always found it a reliable activity to generate rapport between the students and myself. As an extension, though, you could get students to write three sentences about themselves and share it with their classmates for them to guess. So, it could end up lasting around 15 minutes or so as a first lesson activity.

Activity 4: What Is The Question?

Activity number four has turned out to be one trusty task that I incorporate into my first lessons, which is titled “What Is The Question?”. For this, you can either share some single word information and the students have to think of the correct question to get the answer. For example, I would share things like “Daisy and Mittens”, “Over 26,000”, “Tenor saxophone”, etc. and students would need to ask the right question to get the answer.

• What are the names of your cats? Daisy and Mittens.
• How many subscribers do you have on YouTube? Over 26,000.
• What musical instrument do you play? Tenor saxophone.

I try to come up with at least six pieces of personal information that I can share in the first lesson and afterwards, I then share some pictures of this. It really helps students to learn more about you outside of the classroom and then they are more comfortable in sharing about themselves. Also, you can review question formation with students or adjust it so students have to run to you with their questions written down on a piece of paper rather than just uttering the question when nominated.

The natural extension to this activity would be for students to share about themselves with their classmates by just providing their own six or more personal statements and their partner has to guess the question in order to get that statement.

Activity 5: Name Circles

I don’t know about you, but I have real trouble remembering names. I came across this final activity which can truly help you memorise the names of your students, plus it is fun. What you do is seat students in a circle with yourself seated there as well. I like to start with a student on my left and ask them to include name, age, nationality, and something interesting such as a hobby. This first person introduces themselves and then the next person to their left introduces the first person and then themselves. The third person on the left would then introduce the first and second person, as well as themselves.

This continues on until the final person who is directly to your right recites all the information from all previous students, and then themselves. Now comes the real challenge where you have to recall all students (names, ages, etc.) and then introduce your. It is a nice acitivity which lightens the mood somewhat, but it also reminds learners that you also make mistakes such as misremembering names or other information which is fine as we are all human.

The activity itself lasts a while depending on the number of students that you have in the classroom. You will then be better able to recall names and you can also get some further information about students while they are introducing themselves.