Activity
Warm up activities
While We Wait
Jasmina Najjar
Maha Bali
Make use of the 5-10 minutes before class time or if you give a break in the middle of class.
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ACTIVITY PURPOSE
Make use of the 5-10 minutes before class time or if you give a break in the middle of class.
USEFUL FOR
When you have time between classes and can log on a few minutes early, this can help engage students who show up early, and encourage them to come on time for class, while helping create a sense of community in the way that people trickling into class early can do in an in-person class.
PREPARATION
Not too much. If using music or coloring pages, you may want to prepare ahead of time, but it can also take about 2 minutes to find something suitable if you don’t have time to prepare ahead of time!
INSTRUCTIONS
In the video, we discuss the following ideas:
- Share music (not too loud) so students hear it when they come in. You can encourage students to sing along, dance along, or just talk over the music. It can spark an interesting music-sharing conversation.
- Tell students you will discuss favorite movies and TV series in those few minutes before class and invite them to join that conversation.
- Share your screen with a coloring page and encourage students to use the annotation function of Zoom to start coloring together – this can be relaxing, and people can still chat while coloring together, without the pressure of cameras focused on their face.
- Encourage students to do some stretching exercises as they may have several video calls that day and forget to do that!
DURATION
These things should not take more than 5 or 10 minutes to do.
ADAPTATIONS AND EXAMPLES
Obviously, you can use the time before class to just be available for students in case they want to talk about anything else – rather than filling the time with other activities; but these are just some variations that may encourage students who would not naturally come in and chat on their own.
TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS
For coloring: any video tool that allows screen-sharing and annotation.
For music sharing: any video tool that allows sharing computer sound.
USEFUL RESOURCES
Do you have any suggestions? Please share them in the comments section below.
Watch Video
ABOUT
- Educator prep: None
- Student prep: None
- Music sharing, On-screen annotation
- Duration: 5-30 mins
This activity is one of a series of activities from Equity Unbound, focused on equitable online community building.
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