Building a sense of community in the classroom is crucial for creating a positive and supportive learning environment. While the typical "All About Me" activity can be a good starting point, there are many other community-building activities that teachers can use to foster relationships that will last the whole year.
Post sponsored by Kami
The "All About Me" activity is a pretty common way to start the school year or semester. We have students share a bit about themselves through a poster or on a worksheet.
But why stop there? There are lots of fun and engaging ways to go beyond the All About Me activity and turn this old activity into a community building experience.
Below you will find five ideas along with links to resources that you can use tomorrow.
Start with a free template
Start with a FREE graphic organizer or worksheet from the Kami template library. There are lots of options to choose from. These All About Me templates are editable or you can use it as is. It's the perfect way to start the activities below because students can brainstorm their ideas and what they want to share.
All About Me for Students | Favorites
Give your students a crafty and creative way to introduce themselves this back-to-school season with an editable All About Me template!
All About Me for Students | Blue with Dashed Lines
This template is great for younger students! Students can fill in this worksheet and even include a drawing of their family. Want to include something else? You can edit this template to make it yours.
All About Me for Students | Colorful Rectangles Template
This template is full of colorful blank boxes that you can add your own ideas to. Edit and adapt this template to guide your students to share whatever you'd like.
Beyond All About Me activities you can use tomorrow
Top 3 About Me!
Your students have probably seen those YouTube videos with a ranked top 10 list. YouTubers rank all sorts of things, from destinations to tech gear to food. It's a great cognitive exercise -- pick a topic, identify criteria, rank them, and justify your rankings. A simple way to start is a little top 3 list, but a bigger top 10 list can help students dive more deeply into a topic.
More info: How to create a YouTube-style top 10 videos
Get to know each other with Flip
It's great to be able to hear and see our students share about themselves but they might not be quite ready to get up in front of the class and share. Flip is a great way to get students sharing with one another through video. You can use this Flip "All About Me!" disco library topic as an introduction activity, a get-to-know-you icebreaker.
Idea: You can create a QR code linked to the Flip video and paste it on their finished worksheet from above.
More ideas: Flip for ALL! 50+ ways to use Microsoft Flip in your class
Code an About Me project in Scratch
The About Me project in Scratch is a fantastic way to introduce students to coding while giving them an engaging way to share about themselves. Students will experiment with sprites, costumes, backdrops, looks, and sounds to create an interactive Scratch project -- a project that helps other people learn more about them and the ideas, activities, and people that they care about.
You can use this About Me in Scratch HyperDoc to guide them through the process.
Create a digital All About Me poster
Google offers interactive lessons that come complete with tutorial videos and all of the links and resources your students need to complete the tasks. This All About Me poster lesson from Google Applied Digital Skills walks students step-by-step through introducing themselves to their classmates by creating a poster you can print (or "hang up" digitally) with Google Drawings.
Classmate Bingo
Create bingo cards with students’ names in each square. Use the completed All About Me worksheets from above to create a clue on an index card for each name. You can use a Bingo Card Generator to create a unique card for each student. Read a fact from the index card and have students guess who it is. The first few times you play be sure to tell them who the facts are about so they can mark off the name on their card. If you play more than once you can rely on students to remember the facts about their classmates as you play.
Personalized "Find Someone Who"
The "Find Someone Who" activity is a fun way to start the year. Students have a paper with a bunch of squares on it with sentences like "Find someone who... went swimming this summer or "Find someone who... has a brother." See the complete Kami activity example below.
But what if it was even more personalized? You can use the finished All About Me worksheets along with this "Find Someone Who" template to find commonalities and even unique characteristics or favorites to create your own class "Find Someone Who" activity.
