national park warm up

Before a review day in the classroom, I like to give warm ups that aren’t really math heavy, since the entire period is reserved for math, and I don’t need to review something on a warm up if they are going to do it themselves anyway.

So, last Thursday, I decided to ask students two simple questions:

“What do you expect to see in a National Park?”
”What national parks do you know of?”

It sparked a short, brief, discussion on what they know about the National Parks, which was very little, and then I shared a fact about each of the National Parks in our state. I showed them a brief picture, a stand out detail, and then used that as my transition into a review day - where each kid choose how to use their time, what to review, where to get their resource, etc.

Just like choosing which park to go to, what to do there, and how to do it, you can make any math lesson the same.

I highly recommend more non-math warm ups. Get the kids talking, thinking, laughing, enjoying the other stuff in life.

After all, that is the point of this whole thing.

Math is Scenic.