Getting to Know You Quiz

One of my favorite activities for the first week of school is a getting to know you quiz. I often announce to my students on the first day of school that there is going to be a quiz, and it will be graded. I let them panic a bit and think that I must be the world’s cruelest teacher. After all, it is the first day of school.

Then, I pass out the quiz. Here’s last year’s quiz:

When students insist that they can’t possible take this quiz because they don’t know me, I just ask them to make an educated guess. Usually the siblings of former students do the best on the quiz. I always give a piece of candy or some other sort of prize to the student who gets the most questions right.

I usually give students around five minutes to complete the quiz. Then, I go over the answers. Afterwards, I give students a chance to write a quiz about themselves for me to take. Last year’s students thought it super unfair that my quiz was free response while the quiz they were writing for me was multiple choice.

Warning – it always takes students a lot more time to write questions about themselves than you would expect! If you are trying to fit a lot into the first day of school, I would only have students write four questions about themselves.

I take each student’s quiz after school on the first day and return them first thing on the second day. Students love grading my answers with markers or highlighters. They are always sure to let me know just how well or how badly I did.

Some students are really tricky with their questions, and I frequently get 0 questions right on a students quiz. Kids do get weirded out by my lucky guesses, though. I often heard “How did you know that?!?”

I collected the “graded” quizzes back from the students to keep in my files for the rest of the year. I often like to flip through them later in the year

Here are a few examples of student written questions.

A Digital Version of the Getting to Know You Quiz

In 2020, due to COVID-related restrictions, I had my students write a single question about themselves in a Google form on the first day of school. I imported these questions into a Quizizz, and we had played a class-wide getting to know you quiz game on the second day of school.

Students really enjoyed answering each other’s questions.