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ARCHIVE: April 2009
“The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the
house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of
your mind.”
—
Kahlil Gibran
The Starter Activity
The most important
skill a substitute teacher can have when is to get the students
immediately on task. This can best be accomplished by having a
starter activity for them to work on the minute they walk
through the doorway. A starter activity should only be about
five to ten minutes in length and allow students to work
individually and quietly.
Some ideas for
effective starter activities are:
• Have students design
nametags or executive nameplates for their desks.
• In a math class, you
might provide students quarter sheets of paper and have them
write five sentences about how they used math outside of the
classroom in the last week.
• Provide students
with quarter sheets of paper and have them graphically represent
what they learned the previous day.
• In younger grades,
have students draw pictures of their daily schedule. Then have
them draw clocks listing what time they did the tasks.
• Put a large poster
of a picture in the front of the room, have students study the
picture. After three minutes, take the picture away and ask them
detailed questions about the picture.
• Photocopy a
worksheet of addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division
facts; have students time themselves on how long it takes to
complete a line of equations.
• Write a brainteaser
on the board, and allow a few minutes for students to try to
solve it.
• Provide students
with a piece of paper and have them write a letter to the
President of the United States.
The possibilities are endless for what you can do for a starter
activity. It is best if you can relate the activity to the
subject you will be covering for the day. Remember, starter
activities aren't busy work. They need to have a purpose and
feedback should be provided on student work. Instead of you
grading the papers, have students trade with a partner and have
the partner write something they liked about the other student's
work at the top of the paper then hand back to the original
owner.
By using a starter activity you will have time to take roll and
prepare so that you may smoothly and quickly transition to the
first item on the lesson plan. The starter activity will also
get students busy, thus decreasing the amount of downtime.
Students who are on task don't have time to create classroom
management problems.
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