You can never predict what the start of the day will look like in primary school. Will you be faced with hoards of chattering, over-excited kids who seem unable to sit down let alone sit still? Or will it be the complete opposite, where you can barely get a word out of anyone? Don’t even think about it at the end of the school year!
Getting the day started with a morning activity helps to centralise the focus of the class, and helps to shift their minds into learning mode. This only needs to be a short, quick-fire activity of 10-15 minutes where students are called upon to solve a problem or concentrate on a task. Circle time offers a great opportunity to include all the students in a morning activity together. Here are five resources for starter activities primary school students will respond well to.
1. Key Stage 2 Literacy
Navigate to any of the tasks on the grid and you’re all set for a quick morning activity. Ideas span all types of thinking and ways of working, from group problem solving like the ‘scenarios game’ where the whole class discusses a scenario (e.g. ‘you find a £20 note in the playground, what do you do?), to individual work like worksheets for checking spelling and other literacy challenges.
2. Classroom Secrets
For quick morning activities that you can hand out and let children get on with, Classroom Secrets offers free, downloadable worksheets each featuring five or 10-minute tasks. Tasks cover numeracy, literacy and puzzles and can be solved individually or as a pair or groups.
3. Lilleshall Primary School
Quick-fire activities for Year 3 can be found on this link, with a different five-minute task on each slide. Tasks include trying to solve a number problem backwards (e.g. ‘try to get 24 from the following numbers’), writing a review for a book they’ve read, or imagining a scenario and coming up with the next scene. These super quick tasks will get students in the learning zone and read to start the day’s work.
4. The Early Morning Activity Pack
For some fun and creative morning activity ideas dip into this slideshow from Teaching Packs. From designing a poster for a snail race to making a list of questions for a dinosaur, to improving a sentence with extra words, there’s something for every mood that takes you or your class. Students are guaranteed to find these imaginative activities fun and might well be looking forward to whatever is in store the next morning.
5. Tes 10-Minute Starters
If none of the ideas above suit your plans, Tes will definitely have something for you. The PowerPoint on the link contains over 200 morning activities which mostly cover numeracy, but also include geography, literacy, art and creative tasks, and puzzles. The document is free to download once you’ve signed up, which is also free. Once downloaded, you’ll have morning activities ticked off for weeks.
