Warm up Techniques

Prepar­ing for a soc­cer game or event is a lot of work, but it’s com­plet­ed a lit­tle at a time. We pre­pare for a large event or an impor­tant game by mas­ter­ing indi­vid­ual skills in parts and then putting them togeth­er. As we grow in our skills we con­tin­ue to review the basics while build­ing on that foun­da­tion. When we warm up for a game, we don’t strain our mus­cles. We remind our body what it is able to do. Like­wise, warm­ing our brains up for a chal­leng­ing year of learn­ing ahead should­n’t strain our brain. 

What’s the les­son here? Don’t expect your brain to jump into advanced Alge­bra or Pre­cal­cu­lus with­out warm­ing up. We know that our bod­ies will be hurt if we try to slam dunk a bas­ket­ball with­out first stretch­ing our mus­cles and run­ning, why do we expect our minds to ignore math for three months and then walk right into the advanced tech­nique like we haven’t been neglect­ing it? 

Often­times our stu­dents sit down to do an assign­ment, fail to under­stand, get frus­trat­ed, and quit. It may not look like they quit. They may still be sit­ting in their chair, but the lies start and then they decide that they can’t do it. Once you decide that you can’t do some­thing. You can’t do it. It’s that sim­ple. Chil­dren and adults alike need to remem­ber that they’ve had many suc­cess­es doing dif­fi­cult things in order to believe that they can con­tin­ue to do dif­fi­cult things. How­ev­er, even with this his­to­ry, the temp­ta­tion to quit when things get hard is still here. We can help our chil­dren proac­tive­ly pre­pare for that temp­ta­tion even as the prepa­ra­tion weak­ens the temp­ta­tion’s pow­er. How do we do that? 

have you ever tried read­ing Shake­speare? Aman­da, here at Scio, has taught many stu­dents to enjoy Shake­speare’s plays and a con­sis­tent pat­tern aris­es in each class: Stu­dents strug­gle with the lan­guage, until act 3. In act 3, some­thing clicks and they begin to under­stand the mean­ing. Basi­cal­ly, they treat­ed act 1 and 2 as warmups.  We need to warmup our brains. 

How do we warmup our brain for a great year of math learning? 

1. Review basic math con­cepts in August — once per week, grab the home­work from the pre­al­ge­bra review class (even if he’s a pre­calc stu­dent, it’ll be easy. That’s okay. warmups are sup­posed to be easy)
2. Read some math­e­mati­cians (Pas­cal or Ray’s arith­metic or even Euclid) 
3. Watch some math videos on youtube(sounds bor­ing, I know. but it’s fast) 
4. Drill those math facts (xtramath.org is a great place to do this quickly)
5. Do some math activ­i­ties (like dou­bling frac­tions for a recipe, use a tape mea­sure, or dis­cov­er the alge­bra on the fram­ing square) 

Some math pro­grams con­tain weeks of review, which is tedious for most stu­dents. Oth­ers con­tain no review, which is frus­trat­ing for most stu­dents. What’s a par­ent to do? Insist on tak­ing time that last two weeks of August to pre­pare your hearts and minds for anoth­er year of learn­ing. Read a hard book. Review some math. Rein­state a routine.