Every teacher knows the importance of a good ‘hook’ or starter to get the lesson off on the right foot. These are just 5 simple ways to ‘spice’ up your starters to ensure you have the class engaged from the very beginning. These techniques can be used in a wide range of subjects and can easily be adapted to suit your class’s needs.

‘Hooks’ are a great way to:

• Set the tone of the lesson
• Gauge understanding & link lessons together
• Engrain skills

Set the tone

It’s important to use an appropriate type of hook activity for the right lesson. You need to set the tone. If you have a lesson where you require lots of discussion and group work, it might be useful to start the class using their discussion skills early on rather than making them do a starter activity in silence. On the reverse side of that, it might not be appropriate to have an all singing and dancing hook to the lesson, when you are expecting them to do a 50-minute assessment in complete silence. Having the right starter signals straight away what the expectations of the lesson are. However, the sort of hook you should use also depends on the content of the lesson. For example, in History, it would not be fitting to have an opening activity of fun and games just before moving onto the topic of the Holocaust. It might be more appropriate to have a more sombre starter which sets the tone and allows the students to understand the severity of what they are going on to study.

Gauge understanding & link lessons together

Hooks are a fantastic way to add a bit of competition and assess how much the class has really learned. Short bursts of questions relating to the last lesson or the last topic really help gauge understanding. It’s important that students see lessons as a connected journey. Students may struggle to see the importance of simple stand-alone lessons but can understand the importance of each lesson if they are aware of the end goal and overarching theme of the topic.

Engrain skills

Hooks can easily help engrain complex skills so that they become second nature. For example, in English, you could give the class a poem to read and teach them to analyse it on their own. However, these skills will most likely need some guidance at first but after a short while, they will become engrained and the class will be able to complete the starter without much teacher input.

1. ‘Catchphrase’

This is a quick way to get your students to come in and switch on. As they enter the room have a slide up which has an array of boxes on it covering up an image. The boxes do not have to be a consistent size, so go nuts! Have harder questions slow-reveal more of the image and easier ones reveal less. This will enable students of all abilities to get involved. The questions on the boxes should link back to prior lessons gained knowledge, or even the last unit!

2. ‘If this is the answer’

A word or number pops up on the board. For example, ‘16’. The class then needs to work out what the question is. This is easily transferable into a range of subjects.

• Maths – What is 4×4?
• English – How many Great War poets are commemorated in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner?
• Science – Sulphur has what atomic number?
• R.E – How many times does the phrase ‘the Father’ appear in Scripture?
• History – How many Nazis were killed in the Munich Putsch?
• Geography – How many states are there in Germany?
• Citizenship – What’s the youngest age you can join the National Citizen Service in the UK?

3. ‘How many points?’

Have a range of questions on the board as the class enters the room. The questions are ranked by the number of points given for a correct answer. The harder the question, the more points. You need to set a goal for the students to reach and then they answer their choice of questions on the board. This is a really easy way to get numeracy into your lesson as they need to add up their scores and also enables you to set individual number targets.

4. ‘No entry!’

Get some quick-fire questions lined up and ready before your class lines up. As you greet them, ask individuals a question. If they get the question correct, they can enter and get their things unpacked, if they are wrong, they head to the back of the queue. This allows you to differentiate through questioning easily upon entry. If a student is really struggling then this can be adapted to a true or false question. Just remember to have something on the board to do for those who have already entered your room (my classes seem to love a bit of competition in the form of ‘how many points?’).

5. ‘Who said what?’

Have some quotes on the board and some famous people. The class needs to work out who said what. Here you try:

• “Sooner will a camel pass through a needle’s eye than a great man be ‘discovered’ by an election.”
• “For when a people is not willing or able to fight for its existence– It has been proven that that is the people’s end.”
• “Only in the steady and constant application of force lies the very first prerequisite for success.”
• “The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.”

And your options are:

• Nelson Mandela
• Queen Elizabeth II
• Adolf Hitler
• Boris Johnson

The trick is that it gets the students thinking about what is actually being said and gets them to consider and apply their wider contextual knowledge.

The correct answer, by the way, was a trick… they are all quotes from Adolf Hitler.

These are just 5 simple ways to grab your students’ attention right from the start of the lesson. Give them a try!