My Warm-up Lesson: "Stop & Play" Miming

For my 5th grade warm-up lesson, I wanted to do three things:

1) Activate Schema
2) Create Interpersonal Connections
3) Relieve Teacher Control

In activating schema, I started the class off with a miming activity. 8 sentences were placed on the board for the students to see. This was to activate the schema that they were going to use these sentences for the classroom discourse. As my co-teacher and I started to to mime out each sentence, the students were forced to use any prior schema to help decide the order of the conversation.

After the miming, I allowed the students to talk in groups. The students activated their interpersonal skills to help negotiate and solve the problem. The students spoke for about one minute. It was great to see some students react differently in their groups. I could see that come students quickly became leaders while some students just listened. Some students started to present notes that they wrote down and talk about their findings.

I hoped to relieve some teacher control, but I surely could have done more. Though the warm-up was more on the monologic side, I tried to have students speak and interact with other students in different ways. At the end of the lesson, my co-teacher and I were calling on groups to put the sentences in order. Next time, I will step off the stage and let the students come up to change it themselves.