Warm-ups

Last week at school we had a real-life illustrator (Margaret Tolland) in and she did a cool thing with the kids called "drawing warm-ups".

She did this by showing different slides of native birds and challenged the students to 'blind draw' (not looking at their paper).  Every 30 seconds the slide would change.  They did about 10 of them before they even stated thinking about their art work. The pay-off and focus time was impressive.

Doing a drawing warm-up

When I got home I told Jo about it and we thought it would be cool to have warm-ups for all curriculum areas. Often schools have things called maths warm-ups, but they are not quite the same. We started thinking about writing.

Using the same rapid fire format we came up with this that we will try out on Monday.

Obviously this is in the very beginning stages.  We'd love to have people contribute any other writing warm-up suggestions and any other ways we could do warm-ups in other curriculum areas.