Helping students jog their memory isn’t always easy. Fortunately, daily warmup activities—supported by Paper™ tutors—can help get your learners up and moving.
Warmups aren’t just for physical education. Many teachers find that it’s helpful for their students to stretch their thinking before getting into the zone with an engaging, interactive lesson.
Warmups can fill several functions, such as:
[READ: “How to incorporate exit tickets—and Paper™—into your classroom routine”]
Some of the key ingredients for a successful classroom warmup are immediacy, relevancy, and interest. If a student participating in the exercise can quickly shift into the frame of mind required for the lesson—and, ideally, have fun in the process—you’re probably on the right track!
Specific strategies for how to craft a compelling warmup activity vary widely. For example, teachers might use thought starters to help students draw personal connections to the upcoming course material, or they could provide opportunities for learners to participate in a structured debate.
Daily warmup activities can go by various names, such as “do nows” or “bell ringers,” and they can be implemented across grade levels and subject areas, from ELA to math, social studies, science, and more. Here are some resources to inspire you as you consider warmup exercises for your lessons.
The Learning Network—a free teacher-focused education hub hosted by The New York Times—outlined 18 types of warmup activities that can be used to help set the stage before students read assigned nonfiction texts. As a bonus, the organization frequently offers detailed lesson plans, each of which includes a suggested warmup activity.
Free educational resources from C-SPAN Classroom include short civics-related video clips arranged by topic and paired with short-answer or discussion questions alongside further reading and other materials. These activities help students engage with the world around them.
Free science lesson plans from the National Science Teaching Association always seem to incorporate some kind of warmup activity. Often, they’re as simple as asking students to recall what they worked on in the previous class and to think up questions that are relevant to the topic of the day. Other times, learners interact with prompts designed to stimulate thinking for the next lesson.
Working with a live tutor can magnify the impact of warmup activities for your students. Here’s how:
Ready to try it out for yourself? We’ve developed a customizable warmup sheet, hosted in Google Docs, to provide students with the support they need to access tutoring, share their answers to your warmup question, and reflect on the feedback they received from their tutors.