Activities to warm students up

Question of the day

When your lesson starts, you can begin by asking students to recall background knowledge relevant to the day’s lesson. The questions can be used as a quick check on students’ understanding/ remembrance on the topic and prompt for students to focus on the key concepts. This activity is simple yet powerful enough to scaffold the concepts students need to construct knowledge. The activity takes 5-10 minutes and students’ answer can be collected on an index card.

One-minute paper

It is a handy way to assess how well your students understand the presented material. You might ask, “What was the most important concept you learned in this class?” or “What are the questions remained unanswered?” You can give students 3 -5 minutes to finish the task. The collected answer from students can let you know their learning progress and may help you to restructure your teaching accordingly.

Line-up

In this activity, students will have to line up according to their level of agreement on a controversial subject. They will then divided into sub-groups according to their position in the line.

What the teacher might say and do:

“All stand up please, let’s line up according to your level of agreement on the statement shown on screen. Let’s make a line across the room, with students who strongly agree with the statement on my right hand side and those who strongly disagree stands at the other end. If you are not sure how your opinion compares with the others, you need to talk to them and find out”

“Now I would like to number you off so that students with different opinion can meet each other and explain your opinion”

This activity is useful to warm students up and give the teacher a glimpse of students’ opinion in general. Students will also have a chance to explore different ideas so they are not just limited by their own thoughts

Questioning

Questions are the simplest form of interaction and can occur at any time during the lecture. By asking questions, students can turn from passive to active participants and from their answers given, you can also know whether they understand the topic or not. Some tips about asking questions:

• Plan for key questions before class (questions related to the main idea in lecture/ tutorial and questions that are crucial for students to understand the topic)
• Ask questions that can be answered
• Open-ended questions are preferred
• Ask only one question at a time and pause between asking and accepting replies
• Move around the room – avoid focusing exclusively on the respondent