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Low-pressure questions and candy ease tension and set the stage for people to have fun and get to know one another with this easy ice breaker. *Free Printable*
Ice breakers are not my favorite thing.
But getting to know people is not unpleasant. Candy is not unpleasant.
So when I needed to come up with a new way to engage a class in a sharing activity, my mind went to a couple of other things I’ve done before. (Why re-invent the wheel, right?)
I thought of a question activity where folks got to choose the question they wanted to answer. Because isn’t it always the case that when you get assigned a question, you always wish you had the question someone else gets??
And I thought of an M&M Ice Breaker activity that is a lot of fun. Because…chocolate.
Liking both of these ideas, I decided to combine them to create something new!
Get to know me ‘a Skittle’ with this easy ice breaker
I decided to use Skittles instead of M&Ms, but you could definitely use M&Ms for this activity instead (there’s a blank template on that page you could customize to have whatever questions you wanted on it).
This activity is so easy!
All you need to do is pick up the fun-size bags of Skittles for your group and print out the question sheets (link at bottom of page) and you’re good to go.
I kept things pretty laid back and told people that they could enjoy their Skittles as long as they held on to at least 4 colors for when it was their turn to answer questions (we only ended up having time to go around the room twice as it was).
And frankly, we had some folks forget, and eat all of theirs and we just trusted that they had had the colors they were choosing to answer. It’s all in fun, right?!
We did have one fellow who played it risky and reached in his bag and randomly pulled out a color on his turn. Brave man.
The ice breaker for people who hate ice breakers
I made a concerted effort to make people in the group feel comfortable with the activity in a few ways.
First, I let each person grab 2-3 bags of Skittles to ensure they’d get a good variety of colors to choose from.
I also tried to make sure that there were plenty of low-key questions that would not be intimidating or feel overly personal.
While we did the activity, I was sure to comment on each person’s response, engaging further if it seemed appropriate. Our group learned some interesting things and laughed a lot.
That’s the final thing, be sure to keep the mood light. Laugh. Have fun!
Where might you use this easy ice breaker?
I used this activity in a church class. It was our first time meeting together in over a year and I wanted our first time back to be light-hearted and a chance to reconnect.
I intentionally included some questions about the past year to help us catch up. (Tell one new skill/hobby you learned in the past year. — Have you made any recent changes to your home? Or are you planning to?)
You could use this in any variety of settings, though (especially if you used the blank template and created questions specific to your group).
- Work gathering
- Ladies group
- Study group
- A class you teach
- …or attend
- A Bible study
- Homeschool group
What other ideas come to your mind?
I haven’t even mentioned yet how proud I was to come up with the pun for the title. Do you love it? Or are you rolling your eyes like my husband did? (Of course he also managed to work “a skittle” into about 3 different conversations in the last week… “I’d like to get going in “a skittle” while.”) LOL
I hope you have as much fun with these as we did!
Enjoy connecting with people!
You can download the printables here:
Blank Template Get to know me ‘a Skittle’
Bookmarking this — great activity! I’m the kind of person who dreads going out to a meeting or activity, but once I get there and get talking, I enjoy it. And this would lend itself so well to, well, breaking the ice and getting into good conversations. Sign me up for the M&M version 🙂
Thanks, Susan! I am with you, I dread things like that too, but a lot of times end up enjoy visiting with folks. Candy helps too. 🙂
This is a cute idea… but what are the “rules”? We have a team meeting with about 20 people so I want to make it fun but not too time consuming.
I’m all about making things work for your group…so I’m loose on rules. 😉
I usually hand out the question sheets and a snack size pack of candy and let people open their candy and browse the questions a bit. I tell them they can snack on their candy, but just save one of each of the colors they’d like to answer questions for (with a group of 20 and not too time consuming, each may have time to answer a couple, maybe?). Then we just start going around and people say which question they are doing, and share their brief answer. It goes pretty quickly (folks will ask follow up questions occasionally, which I find fun, but sometimes you have to nip conversation in the bud and move on to the next person to keep things moving).
But even with those rules… I’ve been in groups where people will say, “Oh, I had a red and I ate it, can I still do a question from that section?” With me… of course! Because the goal is to get us talking, not stressed out about which question you’re answering.
Have fun with it!
Love this! Thank you so much for sharing!
You’re welcome! Thanks for your feedback.
Hello, with the bank template I’m unable to edit and add my own questions. How do I customize it while keeping the template?
Thank you!
You would have to hand write them in using the blank template, or perhaps type out your questions trying to space them to fit and insert the template into your printer. Hope you have fun with the activity!