Who is this?

Guess Who is a simple ice breaker which can be used on the first day of class. There’s little preparation and it can easily develop into a chat or discussion with more advanced classes.

All you need to prepare this activity are small strips of paper; say two for each student. (Of course if you want to add more to the activity you can instruct the students on doing this for themselves.)

Running the Activity

Give each student two strips of paper and tell them to write on each strip an interesting, true, but unusual fact about themselves. For example:

• I met the President 3 years ago.
• My hobby is star gazing.
• My sister is married to a national football player.
• I once jumped out of an plane at 30,000 feet!

The slips are folded up and put into a shoe box and mixed up. Pick out a slip at random and read it out loud and then – with the class’ help – try to guess which student wrote it. You have 3 guesses and if you still haven’t found it, the writer must stand up and tell the class.

Depending on the subject of the fact, you can ask a few questions about it and it’s likely that others in the class will want to know more.

• So where did you jump out of this plane?
• How long have you been star gazing?

Once you’ve demonstrated it, the person who stood up takes a strip and reads it out then tries to guess who wrote it.

Of course this is just a basic version, it’s easy to turn this into a team game or develop it further into discussion and so on.