Creating Effective Warm-Ups

I'll confess… I love warm-ups.  They are my sanity keeper.  They give me just a moment of peace at the beginning of class to get my head back into place after the chaos (organized chaos, of course) of the last period.  They allow me just a minute or two of silence where, in my mind, I can just sit back and close my eyes and relax.  In reality, peaceful though it may be, this is my time to take attendance, address small issues, and make sure I'm ready to begin another 111-minute class period.

I like the structure that having a warm-up allows as well.  My students know that when they come into the room, that they go straight to the shelf near the door and the warm-up will be sitting there.  I just love if there is a day that I've forgotten to put the warm-up out changed routine and a student comes up to me and says, "Where's our warm-up?".  It just makes me smile…

In the past we've used Math Minutes or MathMate's as part of our warm-ups.  Since I'm in the process of integrating both 8th grade Common Core standards as well as Algebra 1 or Geometry into the same year (see my previous post about this craziness), I'm worried that the pace we'll have to work at will not allow for as much processing time as I'd like for each topic.  Depth of knowledge is also a concern, but that's for another post.  This summer I'm working with the other two 8th grade math teachers and we are going to come up with our own warm-ups that will both review previous topics as well as look at what was learned in the last class session.  I'm in charge of the first 10 and have gotten a jump on them. I think I'm going to call them "Recap & Reviews" since the first 5 questions will be related to things that they students learned in the past and the second 5 questions will be related to the homework topic.  (With 111-minute class periods a 10-question warm-up is quite doable.)

Here's a sample of my RR for the second day of learning.  The first 5 questions come from 7th grade standards since we won't have been in 8th grade for more than a week yet, and the second 5 questions are covering translations and reflections from the prior class.

I'm hoping, that by including the Review section, we will be able to continually remind students of things they learned during the year instead of trying to have them remember just before state testing time.  I'll keep you posted on my thoughts...