TM4T NQT - A Year's Supply of Starters - Page 1

Welcome to the Land of a Thousand Starters...

Well, first of all, let me clarify - we haven't gone and prepared 1000 ready-to-teach individual starters for you; put each one on its own PowerPoint slide so all you have to do is read the Notes Page and stick it on the WhiteBoard. That would be crazy.

What we've done is prepared 642 ready-to-teach individual starters for you; put each one on its own PowerPoint slide so all you have to do is read the Notes Page and stick it on the WhiteBoard. 642 is much more logical number. If it isn't clear why, click here.

I should also clarify: we're not suggesting that you actually need 642 starters each year. We're suggesting that you need many, many more. In addition to our modest contribution, you will need:

• a toolbox of more basic starters. For example: "Write down three key words that we talked about last lesson, and how you would explain one of them to a visitor from another planet"

• a collection of more sophisticated starters. By 'sophisticated' I mean technologically sophisticated. There are l-o-o-o-a-d-s of wonderful electronic games (wordsearch, hangman, sudoku) out there. It's what your whiteboard is for. Our small contribution is here.

The key point here is that you shouldn't be desperately trying to think up and develop starters for your everyday lessons, you should be choosing a starter from the vast stockpile you already have.  You should be adding to that stockpile occasionally, filling in gaps to meet your student's particular needs (and sharing your work with your colleagues nationwide and globally) but that should be the exception, not the rule. That's the TM4T philosophy. 

To Download the Starter Collections

Each collection offers 50 starters; as far as possible they are ready-to-cook; you may need to read the Notes page (so you know the answers) but otherwise - with a very few exceptions - they need no preparation or resources whatsoever. To download any of these collections, just click on the image of the first slide shown in each of the following sections. A new window should open up, with a preview of the presentation. In this second window, click File, then Download, as shown in the illustration on the right  (notice that there are two "File"s to choose from - you need to choose the lower one).

You also need to know that not all the collections may be available simultaneously. We are still awaiting confirmation of a few copyright permissions, and we will also be correcting errors as they are reported. Accept our apologies and please be patient.

Note that these are MIXED collections, so just 'cos the first slide says 'Word Game' that doesn't mean that the other forty-nine are word games. They are all a selection of word games, number games, logic problems, optical illusions, pavement art, lateral thinking puzzles and trivia.

With the odd exception, NO additional resources are needed - not even the Web - and only read-the-notes type of teacher preparation. Obviously, you need to pick the appropriate starters according to year-group and ability. 

NOTE: the first slide in each collection summarises the conditions of use, and must not be removed from the collections.. Any material developed by TM4T is free to use under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license, but the collections include material protected by other copyrights.

One issue...

We don't want to make our older colleagues go all misty-eyed, but do you remember Teacher's Resource Exchange? It looked like the image on the right and it was, well, wonderful. Packed with clever resources, and contact details, and easily searchable, and oh.. it was just great.  And then David Cameron invented austerity and now it's gone. Well, it's still kind-of-there, but it's almost unusable, unless you know exactly what you're looking for and have 75 minutes to kill.

The thing is that quite a few of our starters originally came from TRE, but now we aren't 100% sure who owns them, or if they are protected by copyright. If we have accidentally trodden on your toes, and claimed a Creative Commons License for your treasured resource, just let us know and we'll fix it.