Warm ups [Classroom]

The way my schedule works, I don't get any student for more than a half-hour at a time. My 5th grade Math Enrichment students I get for 15 minutes every morning. 15 minutes twice-a-week for my 5th grade Reading Enrichment students. This means for those students a Warm Up activity is all we have time to get to. With my 5th grade Math students, I try to spend Monday getting them going on a "project" that they can work on outside my classroom. You can see an example of this in my Dream Vacation post. This way they have something to work on when they inevitably get done with their classwork before their classmates.

In this post, I'm going to keep a running list of Warm Up activities I've found that enrich student learning. I'll separate them into three categories:

• Reading
• Math
• Critical Thinking

I define Warm Up as an activity that last 15 minutes or fewer, takes minimal planning (what Dr. Bertie Kingore would call "just right"), and is adaptable to those situations that come up in schools.

The Lists

Reading:

• Boggle - $10 on Amazon - Boggle is great because it's so flexible. It can be a competition for older students: (3-letter words and longer only, 4-letter and up, etc.) It can also be a vocabulary builder for younger students: play a round, then the students can find synonyms/antonyms for the words they found. It can also be a creative springboard: play a round then students write a story/poem using all the words they found.
• Speed Scrabble - $15 as Bananagrams on Amazon - Speed Scrabble is a game I learned in college. Come to find out later, it's actually a game called Bananagrams. My wife bought a bag of scrabble tiles (no board) at an Archivers scrapbooking store. The game of Speed Scrabble is simple: everyone starts with 7 tiles each, face down. Someone says "Go" and all flip their tiles and begin to build their own set of words, all connected, just like a normal scrabble game. Once someone has used all their tiles, they say "Go!" and everyone grabs another tile from the facedown pile. This continues until all the tiles are used. The limit of this game is that it using students' existing vocabularies. The first time I played with third graders, I got immediately inundated with "Is ____ a word?" At first I had students look the word up, but the game is Speed Scrabble, after all. The answer I currently use is, "What does it mean?" If they don't know, I just have them move on. This only works because 95% of the words they ask about are made up. "Is lud a word?" If anyone has a better answer, please share in the comments.
• Picture Sentences - Notebook paper and pencil (each) - Each student (and the teacher...this one is fun!) start by drawing a scene in the top margin of a sheet of notebook paper. I usually give the example by drawing basketballs playing football on a river. It needs to be something that is easily captioned. When finished drawing, learners fold the scene backward and pass it along to the left. The student who receives it looks at the picture, then write a sentence describing the picture on the front. After writing the sentence, they fold that back, covering the picture, and pass it along. The next person only sees the sentence, and draws an illustration of it. And so on. It's a game of telephone, but with words and pictures.

Math:

• Dice Game - 6 dice - I like having five white and one red. Roll them all. Multiply the red one times 10. You're left with six numbers, something like: 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 40. Students then create an equation that get the white dice to equal the red one (times 10). If they're advanced, have them find two or three equations. Maybe the equation has to use parentheses or an exponent? It's up to you. My 5th graders love this game.

Critical Thinking:

• ThinkFun Brain Games - $5-$30 - ThinkFun all kinds of critical thinking "brain games." I've used Rush Hour with students in grades 1-5. I received Hoppers as a gift this Christmas.
  

Let's get these comments rolling! What do you use in your classrooms?