Based on my research and personal philosophy, the use of quick warm-up activities in class can be beneficial for several reasons. One of the most important reasons to use a warm up activity is for review for students who may not have not fully mastered the prerequisites. A warm up activity can be used to review prerequisites and to gauge student mastery.
As a warm up activity I’d begin my lessons by having my students complete several problems that cover prerequisites. Hopefully the warm up activity will also give me time to circulate among the students and have quiet one-on-one conversations. I’d use this discussion time to perform informal assessments on my students.
Excellent big-picture overview.
ReplyDeleteWhen designing the warm-up component of a lesson plans, one might want to refer back to the sentence in our Group Project #1 on Warm-ups that displays a wide variety of possibilities, and try to mix in all of these as time goes on.
Since this component involves research, please add a few paragraph(s) that discusses a little more in depth discussion. For example what are some of the techniques you use to 'check for understanding' for 'all' students; and how do parts of your warm-ups address some of the other criteria that are also best practices?