When students come back to school to start a new school year, this is the ideal opportunity to dedicate a small amount of your time to invite your students to interact, share, make new friends and strengthen existing relationships.

 

Building Student Relationships Matters

 

The stronger the relationships among your students or colleagues, the more prepared they will be to engage productively with one another. And we all know that engaging people – no matter what age – is the hardest (yet most critical) part of creating a productive learning or working environment.

The more time you take to create build relationships at the start of a new year, the less anti-social behaviours you will need to manage throughout the rest of the year. Research shows that staff and students not only become more productive, but incidents of anti-social behaviours drop significantly.

There are countless activity ideas you can integrate into your new year which will quickly and easily invite your group to ‘break the ice,’ get to know one another and strengthen their relationships.

 

Try These Back to School Activity Ideas

 

Here’s a sample sixty-minute program featuring a bunch of hand-picked, fantastic group activities. Try the whole program or pick and choose what you like or have time for.

The activity links will direct you to playmeo. No equipment is necessary, and all of the step-by-step instructions are just a mouse click away.

 

Back to School Activity Template

What you need: 10+ people, 60 minutes, no equipment

  1. Categories – simple random-grouping which fosters lots of interaction.
  2. Thumb Wrestling in Stereo – innovative variation of the class thumb-war.
  3. Jump In Jump Out – one of the most hilarious group games out there.
  4. Fill Me In – useful and active name-reminder game.
  5. Paired Shares – opportunity to share in pairs for small groups.
  6. Tea Cup Stretch – unique one person stretch.
  7. Everybody’s It – classic all-time favourite run-around game.
  8. Leaning Tower of Feetza – quick and easy group initiative.
  9. Pairs Compass Walk – an exciting challenge for two people.

 

There are many more easy-to-use ‘back-to-school’ program templates that form a large part of playmeo’s online activity library.

Many activities are free to use, while others may be unlocked when you join one of playmeo’s popular Monthly or Annual membership plans. Affordable Enterprise (multi-user) plans are available too, ideal for groups of 3 or more teachers.

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