All linked up

So have you ever heard of the ice breaker game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”? You know, that game where you can connect any actor or actress with Kevin Bacon with 6 or less connections. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, take a sec and Google it. And, if you have no idea who Kevin Bacon is, well, just forget you read this paragraph and keep reading because Kevin Bacon really has nothing to do with this entire blog post, but I digress.

The idea of All Linked Up is to see if you can connect everyone in your class through common names, interests or activities.  To do this, students will need to know things about each other, so this one might be best played at the end of the week or during the second or third week of school.

To start out, make the connections anything that the students have in common.

It might be something like this:

Mary is connected to Mike, Margaret and Matthew because all of their names all start with M. Matthew is connected to Sarah because they both have 2 brothers. Sarah is connected to Kim, Jennifer and Lola because they all like the color pink. Lola is connected to Jonathan because they both like to read. And so on . . .

Once you can connect the whole class in a few different ways, you might try limiting the connections to one or two commonalities like favorite foods or members of the family. Or challenge the class to see if they can connect everyone in 10 or less links.

There’s something about knowing that you are in some way connected with your entire class that helps you feel like you are part of something bigger than yourself. You could also build a paper chain as a representation of these connections and keep it hanging in the classroom.