Enrichment
Starter For Ten? What is the purpose of a starter? Is it to engage, motivate, challenge or keep students quiet whilst the administration tasks are done? The purpose of a starter has certainly adapted in recent years to almost disappearing but of course without a start; there is no middle or end. The introduction of flipped learning can often mean that the starter is completely turned on its head with students working backwards, does the starter become an explanation task? For many years, starter tasks were used to review knowledge but at what point we were led to question, does a tale of recap lead to stretch and challenge? I’m sure that some of us around for the introduction of the Literacy and Numeracy hour (celebrating its 25th year last year) will remember the segmented clock of which a starter was a prevalent part as a main class activity on text. The numbers 15,15,20,10 will be enough to cause a bristle I’m sure with memories of observations carried out with a stopwatch in hand. So what do you want to do with your starter activity? How do you use this ‘dead time’ as students roll into class, the register gets done and they begin to engage with their subject turnover depending on where your class is in the school? A recent learning walk saw the use of students doing the recap and challenging questions presented by them by a member of the class, another saw students come into their classroom and fervently writing their time tables as practice and one lesson saw students entering a class, selecting a subject specific but random independent activity from a pot and beginning work on decrypting it.
14
