I teach twice a week and have (and want!) to start my classes with an icebreaker, just to warm-up, but the problem is that I have only one student (private class) and I'm running out of icebreakers and all the sites I've visited give them only for a group of students.
Could anyone help me, giving me suggestions of icebreakers for only one student?
There's one I quite like and it's very low stress to prepare. Cut up a sheet of paper into about 24 or more small squares. Write one of the words or expressions from your last lesson on the squares. Put them face down in front of you both, then take turns to pick up a card and explain what's on it without saying the word/ expression itself for your student to guess or for you to guess (or give an example sentence, but also without using the actual word but blank instead ). It's quick and easy recycling and helps you to get to know what your student has retained from the last lesson.
Another vocab based one, is to make some anagrams of some single word language items and get your student to reorganise the letter. Or the same technique and give them cut up sentences from the last lesson.
Also, as you will be perfectly well aware, any short fun pairwork activity can just as easily be done with your one to one student.
Tell them that each time they arrive for a lesson you will each be a different person. If they are adult, you might start the lesson as the Prime Minister of their country for example, your student will be someone else. For the first ten minutes you have to discover each other's identity.
Since warmers are mostly about speaking, most pairwork activites can be adapted for the one-to-one classroom. The teacher shouldn't worry about taking the other role but should be careful not to overpower the student. Here are some sugestions:
Let the student interview you or vice versa for an unlikely job - maybe a clown in a circus.
Find out if the student has bought anything they had to return and then act it out with you in the role of shop assistant.
Get the student to take part in a shouting dictation with you. You have alternate lines in a text and have to dictate them to each other from opposite ends of the room - put the radio on if you want to make it difficult. Write only what you hear the student say even if you wrote the original yourself.
See who can tell the biggest lie.
Spot the lie. The student interviews you about your life and during the course of the interview you tell three lies the student has to accuse you of being a liar if they doubt something you say.
Finish my sentence. You take turns starting a sentence then the other has to finish it as quickly as possible.