A warm-up is a short activity at the start of a lesson to jump-start students' thinking. Warm-ups have many purposes including:
- to introduce a new topic
- to reinforce skills
- to motivate students
- to prepare students to learn
- to assess how much students know
Warm-up time is also a great time to promote higher order thinking. For example, students who have mastered the math facts may be bored with the following warm-up:
Fact masters need the "benefits of a proper warm-up" such as,
Needless to say, the second warm-up:
- is more challenging.
- reinforces relationships between facts.
- requires higher-order thinking!