Re-Thinking Warm-Ups

We've been told for so long that students need a bell-ringer, warm-up, do now as soon as they walk in the classroom. For math, generally that content falls into one of three arenas:

• 3-4 problems that review content from the day before
• A pre-requisite knowledge probe to see what students already know on some content
• A problem or two of review from previous content in the semester

I have definitely leaned hard on these for sometime now as my "GO TO" when starting a lesson. (I have also used my warm-up as the hook in a 3 act task, but that kind of falls in category two anyways.) What is my newest favorite way to design a warm-up? Take a look here!

So a couple things worth noting about this warm-up. Its the warm-up I do after students complete factoring with algebra tile lessons, but before learning the formal patterns (rules) for factoring GCF, basic trinomials, and difference of squares, and factoring by grouping (All with the box, I'll state my case for that in another post soon!).

As far as the benefits I've gotten from a warm-up like this:

• My students are reviewing content, but beyond that they are anchoring tasks from my classroom teaching and previous skills and tasks to the subject at hand all the way back from elementary school. They are explicitly seeing vertical alignment.
• My students are seeing the whole picture of factoring and defining the term themselves based off all the tasks in the warm-up. This is much more powerful than having them recall from memory.
• One of my favorite parts of this warm-up was the way it played out in the classroom. Some of my strongest students were struggling to do the review portion and some of my weakest were finding lots of success in the skills they had tucked away from elementary and middle school. Students were trading solutions and collaborating in a very strong way in the completion of this work. 
• All of my kids had to reflect on their learning in the final question. They all executed skills, but how were they different/similar.

Simply put, this has been the answer I've been searching for. The only down-side is that sometimes I spend 15-20 minutes on a warm-up in a 90 minute class. By the time we finish and I see the power in this design, I never stress because that time lost is actually well used and critical to success in my class.

Here are a couple others I've done recently with my reworked method. The second has a really great way of pushing the kids to understand past skills and creates that exchange.