WARM-UP activities


 

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Have you ever worked out without warming up first? If you do that, chances are your performance will not allow you to show the best of you. Believe it or not, the same happens in lessons. 

Warm up activities are effective since they create a need for communication, they activate systemic and background knowledge, motivate and create expectations. They can be used to pre-teach new words and set the purpose for any presentation. They can be a fun way to lower stress levels and to connect with students. And best of all, these characteristics will make the lesson meaningful.

Cognitively speaking, we set the learning machinery into motion. By creating effective warm-up activities, we make the brain start connecting and finding paths to find information. Memories stored in the long term memory are retrieved into the working memory. It is important to remember that our working memory provides temporary storage and manipulation of the information necessary for complex tasks such as language comprehension, learning and reasoning. Working memory is described as “a collection of mental processes that preserve a limited amount of information in an especially accessible form, long enough for it to be of use in ongoing cognitive tasks” (Osaka, N. et. al, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Working Memory, 2007).

Because working memory processes a limited amount of data, our warm up activities must be short, though we should not allow it to vanish into thin air. There must be some kind of processing of the information, otherwise, we would be asking the brain to waste an enormous amount of energy for nothing. For example, if your activity implies eliciting names of fruit, ask students to write them down and circle the ones they like and cross out the ones they dislike, or sort them into colours. The whole point is to process the information that is receiving focal attention.  

So next time you get ready to plan, don't forget the importance of these activities. Whether your lessons are synchronous or asynchronous, allow some time to warm-up. 

How much do YOU like them? Do you have a favourite warm-up activity that you adapt depending on the group? 


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