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What are your mathematical goals for you students? Let me share mine. I want my students to

love math and see value in it
thinking flexibly & creatively with numbers
be problem solvers

Do any of those match up with your goals? if so, you’re probably searching for a routine that will help get your students there. Through my math certification program, I began picking up, tweaking, and creating quick & fun routines that get kids thinking about math. Not only thinking, but also discussing.

And now I’m gonna share out favorite math warm-ups with you! ALL THIRTEEN OF THEM.

Here is a sneak peek of the schedule I follow for math warm-ups.

These are not worksheets, spiral review slides, or memorization based routines. These are quick, fun, easy warm-up routines that get students thinking and talking. And for most of them, you don’t need anything more than whiteboards or a whiteboard type app!

Our class uses the app Nearpod for math time. The beauty of Nearpod is I can pull resources right into the app, send it out to every student (without a student sign up!) and they can interact with the resources. When they interact with it, whatever they do comes right back to me.

I love to drop our math warm-ups into Nearpod as “draw-it” slides. Most of the routines start out asking kids to think mentally. But, I also want students to practice explaining their thinking through writing or images (or both!). Plus, when I ask students to interact on their screen and turn it in, I get automatic feedback and assessment. This allows me to have data to group and help my students with what they need.

But even if you don’t have or use Nearpod, these routines will definitely work for your classroom!

Today we are going to talk about

My Favorite Number!

Now you may have seen this idea before, sometimes it is called Target Number. I like to call it Favorite Number because I tell my kids “I’m going to give you my favorite number today, and you are going to show me all the ways to represent that number.” Eventually, they will giving ME their favorite numbers.

The first few times we do this activity, I give the number. I will write it on the board and students will put it in the space on their Nearpod. Then, I will set a timer for 1-2 minutes (your choice) and students have that much time to fill the space with ways to represent that number. They might show it in base ten, draw it, make a number sentence, use addition, subtraction, multiplication or division. They might make a string of numbers, skip count, etc. The important part is that they are being flexible with numbers!

At first, students will put very basic ways to make the number. Through modeling, praise, and practice they will get better.

After the timer goes off, I have students count up how many ways they made the favorite number. The person with the most stands up and reads off their ways.

THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART.

As the student is saying the ways they made the number, I am recording them on the board. Students must agree or disagree with every single way the student has said. I tell my class “I will not say if something is right or wrong so if you guys don’t pay attention, a wrong way might just slip in!”. They are very vigilant after that. We accept solutions that work and if a solution comes up that doesn’t work, I have the class work together to revise it so that we can still include it on the board (for example, if someone said 3+5 for 9, we could revise it to 4+5!). The person who came up with the most ways gets to put a marble in our “brain jar”.

BUT, I don’t just reward quick solutions. Our class values flexibility and creativity. So, after the person with the most solutions sits down, I ask the class who thinks they came up with the most creative way to make our favorite number. I will call students, share their Nearpod on the screen, and again, we as a class, will decide if their way works or not. This is the buy-in to get kids to think more flexibly with their numbers and not stick with the basics.

After students are used to the routine, I will start letting students give a favorite number. This would be a great job for your leader. Start by giving them simple parameters like “the number must be between 1-100” or “100-200”.

Eventually, you can get more strategic with your parameters. Some of my slides for student-choice numbers say they must pick a number that is even/odd, less than __ but greater than ___, have certain amounts of tens, hundreds, ones, have more or less tens/hundreds, etc. This step gets them thinking even MORE about numbers! See the pattern?

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That is math warm-up TWO! I have seen an increase in my students’ excitement about math and a dramatic increase in their flexibility with number. Favorite Number is probably the EASIEST warm-up to try-out! It is so easy yet packs such a punch with number sense! What are you waiting for!?