Everybody dislikes icebreakers to some extent. My introverted students especially can’t stand them. And yet they’re still really important, especially with a group of kids who don’t know each other well. I finally found one that actually works, and I have to give credit to a teacher I met at the Shakespeare Institute at Agnes Scott College in Georgia in 2024, whose name I don’t remember. If you ever see this: thank you. It’s my favorite icebreaker now, and my students loved it.
If you’re not familiar with the word, tableau comes from tableau vivant, French for “living pictures.” It’s a common English class activity: students work in a group to visually present a concept, scene, or idea while staying completely still. I’ve used it with vocabulary and with scenes from drama. The twist with this version is that the tableau represents something everyone in the group has in common.
Here’s how I set it up:
- Groups of four or five students (six if your classes are large).
- Give them a couple of minutes to list things every single person in the group has in common. No low-hanging fruit; skip the obvious stuff like “we’re all wearing shirts.” Something like “we all have a younger sibling” or “we all rode the bus to school” works better.
- If they’ve got a few options, have them pick their best, ideally the most unique trait of the group.
- Give them a few minutes to practice arranging themselves into a silent, frozen pose that represents that thing, without talking or moving once they’re in position.
- When they’re ready, tell the rest of the class to close their eyes (“curtains”). The group gets into position, then you say “open curtains” and the audience tries to guess what they have in common while the group holds the pose until someone gets it.
One group I had turned out to all have at least one younger sibling. They acted it out with one student as an annoyed older sibling while the rest did classic little-kid things: pulling on her shirt, making faces, fighting over a toy. The class guessed it pretty quickly.
The whole thing moves fast, about fifteen minutes for three or four groups. What I liked most is that my students said they’d never done an icebreaker quite like it before, which is the hardest thing to pull off once you’ve been teaching a while and keep reaching for the same handful of activities.
Grab the slideshow I use to walk students through the directions here; it’s a free Canva template you can copy and adjust for your own class.