The warm-up, during the first three to five minutes of class, is the perfect time to re-teach critical concepts that students are struggling to understand. And this is a classroom routine that you want to establish immediately. However, most teachers want to wait until students struggle with current content before beginning the practice.

 

Don’t make this mistake. Start using the re-teaching warm-up during the first week of school.

 

Before school starts, review last year’s data from the prior grade. Look for the concepts that the students bombed. For example, if I teach 4thgrade math, I want to identify what concepts students did the worst at in 3rdgrade math. Those are the concepts I will re-teach during my warm-up for the first couple of weeks. Right up until I need to re-teach concepts from this year.

 

Here’s an added benefit when you implement this practice… When you start using the warm-up to backfill gaps in prior year’s knowledge early in the school year, the longer you can go before students begin to stumble with current year concepts.

 

Think. Work. Achieve.

Your turn…

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