Back to School Icebreaker - Pictionary game for students

The new school year is approaching, and we would like to offer you an excellent icebreaker idea to kick start the new year in a fun way that your class will love. Kids of different ages enjoy drawing, and our drawing and guessing game is a great platform to organize a Pictionary game for students in your digital Classroom, be it remote or face to face.

Drawize is already used a lot in schools both for fun and learning. Teachers use our custom words option to define what words will be used in a particular game, customizing it for an array of different purposes. Some use it for fun at the end of class or the end of the day - in that scenario, you are free to use any words you think are fun for your pupils. Others use it for learning (biology parts of the body, vocabulary practice, math terms, second language reinforcement). However, you can use it in any other class by using a list of terms specific to the learned topic for the day.

This time we invite you to use it at the beginning of the school year as a great icebreaker activity that is guaranteed fun for kids. Many of them play it in their free time already, so bringing it into class with an ad‑free session can create instant engagement. (Teachers now have a dedicated Classroom license for ad‑free hosting.)

Set up your classroom room in 60 seconds

1. Open drawize.com → Private rooms → Create new room
2. Click the gear icon → enable Custom words → paste one of the lists below (once your list has 5+ words, the game uses only your words)
3. Optional: switch the Profanity filter on, and enable Owner never draws if you'd rather not draw yourself
4. Share the room link with your students — no accounts, no emails, they're in the game in seconds. Tip: the invite panel's Spectator switch gives you a watch-only link for the classroom projector.

Grade-level variants: for K-2, enable Only owner draws and let the class guess while you draw (works great on the projector). Grades 3-5 shine with the default setup where everyone takes a turn drawing. For middle and high school — or any class over ~12 active players — use Teams mode so turns come faster.

You can come up with a word list tailored precisely for your class — or copy one of these three ready-made icebreaker lists straight into your room.

Get-to-know-you icebreaker word list

Hobbies, favorites and interests — all drawable. Icebreaker twist: when it's a student's turn, Drawize offers a few words from the list to choose from — tell them to pick the one closest to something they actually love, and after the round they share their real answer with the class.

Summer memories word list

Ease the class back in by drawing the summer they just had:

Back to School Pictionary word list

To use any of these lists, select the words and copy them, open your room settings, enable the custom words option, and paste them into your room's custom word list — new lines between words are handled automatically. The list stays saved on your room, so you can reuse it class after class.

Want more themed lists — animals, ESL, science, Spanish, French, holiday words? Browse all 12 on our Pictionary word lists page; each one can start a classroom room in a single click.

To read more about using Drawize in the Classroom, please visit our blog post on the online Pictionary for Classroom or view Classroom plans.

See Classroom plans