Alpha Biographies: A First Week of School Icebreaker

Every educational guru will tell you it's important to build relationships with your students and create a classroom where kids feel safe talking to each other.

And as boots on the ground educators, we agree.

The hard part is finding activities that are actually meaningful and engaging.

And not cringe.

Especially in middle school.

This week, I'm sharing four things you can do with your middle schoolers that actually work.

No trust falls. And no "two truths and a lie" that somehow always ends with someone's truth being about their pet's death.

First up: Alpha Biographies

Here's How It Works:

1️⃣ Every student gets a worksheet with a box for every letter of the alphabet.

2️⃣ They get 10 minutes to mingle around the room, talk to classmates, and find out something about them that starts with a letter they still need.

Do they like to play Hacky Sack? That goes in the H box.
Do they live on a Llama farm? That's an L (yes, that's a real example from my own classroom).

3️⃣ They write two sentences. One states the fact. One adds a detail that makes it interesting. The classmate initials the box to confirm it's accurate.

By the end, students have had short, low pressure conversations with a dozen different classmates, and you've got a room full of paper trails showing you exactly who's into what.

Why It Works

✅ Nobody's standing in the corner. The mingling forces movement.

✅ Nobody's hiding out. Everyone has to have real (if brief) conversations.

✅ It's a legitimate academic task in disguise. Two sentence writing, fact plus detail, wrapped in something that feels social instead of academic.

Tips for Success

Set the expectation up front. Students have to talk to a new classmate before they can double up with someone they've already talked to. Otherwise you'll get three besties filling out each other's whole alphabet in five minutes flat.

Do the activity with them. Walk around, talk to students, fill out your own paper. It's the fastest way to build trust in week one, and kids love finding out something random about you too.

Add a prize. Whoever fills in the most boxes wins something small. Doesn't have to be fancy. Middle schoolers will compete for a piece of candy like it's the Hunger Games.

Share out at the end. Start with one student (alphabetically, by seating chart, whatever works for you) and have them share what they wrote for box A. Then move to the next student for box B, and keep going around the room.

If a student doesn't have anything for their assigned letter, ask for a volunteer who does, then circle back to that student for the next letter.
If nobody has anything for that letter, just skip it and move on.

Want to run this in your own classroom?

You can whip this up yourself, just create 26 boxes on a Google Doc (one for each letter) and you're good to go.

Or if you'd rather skip the formatting and get straight to the fun part, I've already built it for you. Worksheet, slides, instructions, all done.