Warm Ups (Do Nows / Bell Ringers / Entrance Tasks / etc.) inspire mixed feelings, according to my conversations with other educators. Some don’t want to deal with the paperwork of having students do that writing every day (and are unsure how much follow up / checking of the warm up sheets to do), or want to give students a chance to breathe a bit between classes before jumping into academic content. Others value the structure it provides to the beginning of class and appreciate the time it gives the teacher to breathe before jumping into academic content. (Jon Cowart lays out his arguments here for how having a Do Now procedure helps with strong classroom management.)
I appreciate the time it gives me as the teacher to take care of administrative tasks: taking attendance in a timely manner, signing stuff for students going on field trips, checking in with individuals. I also use my very simple warm up sheet as a note catcher for new vocabulary, grammar pop ups, and a place to write down the weekly password into our class. Warm Ups also remind me to spiral and retrieve older content in a more structured way instead of always forging forward. I try to make mine mostly input-focused, but scaffolded output is also possible!
Here are the formats I generally use for Warm Ups – I hope they serve you!
| L2 -> L1 Translation | This is a go-to for me: take sentences from a recent story, conversation, using recent vocab, whatever and have students translate them to English. This helps review previous content, see the written form of the language, and review any grammatical differences between the languages. |
| L1 -> L2 Translation | I use this one a little more sparingly, and only after students have had lots of input on any given structures. This can help students build confidence in their writing skills in the L2 if they see they can put sentences together. |
| Fill in the Blanks with New Vocab | Create sentences that are missing new vocabulary terms to review new terms and build sense of how they fit into new sentences. |
| Sentence Frames | I have seen Steve Smith call this “Start the Sentence” or “Finish the Sentence.” Give students a subject and a verb, and have them finish the sentence as makes sense to them. (“I play…” “I am…” “I have…” “I was…”) AND/OR give them a detail to incorporate into an original sentence. “on the weekend” “with my friends” “German and English” |
| Question and Answer | Just ask an interesting question! I sometimes provide a sentence starter to get students going, or I just leave the students to respond at their own proficiency level. (Words, phrases, sentences, etc.) |
| Matching | This can obviously be done with terms and their definitions in the L1, or terms and pictures, but you can also do this with sentence beginnings and endings. This helps increase the amount of input and builds reading skills. |
| Reorder Sentences | Also sometimes called a discourse scramble, having students put events in a logical sequence (based on common sense, something discussed in class, or their predictions) can be another great way to get input and build literacy. |
| Imposter Reading | Sometimes this is done with vocabulary terms (“Find the odd one out: corn – carrots – broccoli – pineapple”), but it could just as easily be done with entire sentences. For instance, if you’ve just done a Map Talk, having sentences about the area studied that are plausible, but one describes a different place. |
| True / False or Multiple Choice | These are good at giving sentence level input, and you could really target whatever language you like with this. You could also give an entire paragraph describing someone, for instance, and then have students choose from options of what that person might do in a given scenario. |
| Always / Sometimes / Never | Provide students with the words in your language for “always,” “sometimes,” and “never,” and then insert them into sentences where they would naturally fall in the language. Students then decide for themselves which is true for the prompt. For example “I (always / sometimes / never) am bored in English class.” “I (always / sometimes / never) sleep in my math class.” “This character (always / sometimes / never) does the right thing.” |
| Find the Cognates | I use this early on in my level 1 classes to build student awareness of cognates: project a reading that is likely far above their level, but which contains cognates. Have students list as many as they can, defining them in the L1. (Works less well for some languages, of course.) |
| Find the Error(s) | Write out some sentences with errors in them, and tell students how many they need to find and correct (or don’t tell them how many!). Use this to point out any tricky grammatical or spelling stuff. |
| Mysterious Person | Describe a person in the L2, and have students guess who the person is. It could be a person in the class, in your school community, or from popular culture. |
| Retrieval Grids | Just learned about this one from Steve Smith’s blog – give students a list of sentence elements (verbs conjugated to subjects, objects, added details) and have them create sentences with them. The task could be to create as many sentences as possible, or to make sentences that are purposefully outrageous. When checking, have students read their sentences aloud, and the class could translate them. |
| Guess What I Did Last Weekend | In preparing this blog post, I keep getting great ideas from Steve Smith: project a chat mat of weekend chat ideas, and have students pose questions in formal language about what you did over the weekend. They pre-write the questions, and then you can answer yes/no or with full sentences + details. |
| What’s the Question? | Display an answer for a question, and have students come up with as many possible questions to elicit that answer as they can. Even more fun: have the answer be short and slightly ambiguous: “No, not right now.” “I can’t do that since the accident.” Or: focus on specific question words. “By car.” “Yesterday evening, actually!” |