Five warm-ups for grades 6–8. Each takes three to five minutes. Answers and teacher notes are in the collapsed box under each prompt.
ELA
Good writers choose precise verbs. One strong verb often does the job of a weak verb plus an adverb. Rewrite each sentence, replacing the words in bold with one vivid verb. Then explain how your verb changes the picture in a reader’s mind.
- The dog ran quickly across the yard to catch the ball.
- “Watch out!” she said loudly.
- After practice, he ate his sandwich very fast.
- Dry leaves moved softly in the wind.
- I looked at the clock for a long time, waiting for the bell.
Answer and teacher notes
Sample answers (many verbs work):
1. dashed, sprinted, raced, bolted
2. shouted, yelled, hollered
3. gobbled, wolfed down, devoured
4. rustled, fluttered, whispered
5. stared at, watched, eyed
Point out that verbs carry shades of meaning: a dog that bolted may be scared, while a dog that bounded sounds happy. “Whispered” in item 4 is personification, giving leaves a human action. Common mistake: swapping in a fancier word that means something different (for example, “the dog strolled,” which is slow). Extension: find three “verb + adverb” pairs in your own recent writing and replace each with one precise verb.
Math
On October 28, 1965, workers put the final stainless-steel section into place on the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri. The Arch is 630 feet tall, the tallest monument in the United States, and it is exactly as wide as it is tall. It is built to bend a little in the wind: the National Park Service says it can sway up to 1 inch in a 20 mph wind and up to 18 inches in 150 mph winds.
- How tall is the Arch in yards? (1 yard = 3 feet)
- How tall is it in meters? (1 foot = 0.3048 meters) Round to the nearest meter.
- The Statue of Liberty measures about 305 feet from the ground to the tip of its torch. About how many times taller is the Arch?
- The 150 mph wind is how many times as fast as the 20 mph wind? The sway is how many times as large? Is the sway proportional to the wind speed? Explain.
Answer and teacher notes
1. 630 ÷ 3 = 210 yards, a little more than two football fields.
2. 630 × 0.3048 = 192.024, about 192 meters.
3. 630 ÷ 305 ≈ 2.07, so about 2 times as tall.
4. Wind: 150 ÷ 20 = 7.5 times as fast. Sway: 18 ÷ 1 = 18 times as large. The sway is not proportional to the wind speed: if it were, 7.5 times the wind would give 7.5 inches of sway, not 18. The sway grows faster than the wind speed.
Discussion for item 4: why would engineers want a tall structure to sway a little instead of being perfectly stiff? (Flexing lets it absorb the force of the wind rather than crack.) Physics connection: the force of wind grows faster than its speed, which helps explain the result. Today is the Arch’s 61st anniversary (2026 − 1965). Common mistake in item 2: dividing by 0.3048 instead of multiplying. Ask, “Is a meter longer or shorter than a foot? So should the number of meters be bigger or smaller?”
Sources: Gateway Arch Fact Sheet (height and completion date); National Park Service: The Gateway Arch Celebrates 50th Year of Completion (sway); Wikipedia: Gateway Arch (width equals height); Wikipedia: Statue of Liberty (height)
Science
Shine a flashlight toward a cat at night and its eyes seem to glow. Many animals, including cats, dogs, deer, cattle, and owls, have a shiny layer just behind the retina called the tapetum lucidum (Latin for “bright tapestry”). It works like a mirror: light that passes through the retina without being detected bounces back through it a second time. Humans, monkeys, and apes don’t have this layer. (a) How does a second pass of light help an animal see at night? (b) Why do you think animals that are active in the daytime, like humans and squirrels, might not need a tapetum? (c) Scientists say the reflected light makes the image slightly blurrier. Why is that a trade-off worth making for a nighttime hunter? (d) In flash photos, people’s eyes sometimes look red instead of glowing. What do you think causes that red color?
Answer and teacher notes
(a) At night there is very little light. Bouncing it back gives the light-sensing cells (photoreceptors) a second chance to catch it, so the animal gets more signal from the same dim light. (b) In daylight there is plenty of light, so there’s no need to “recycle” it; sharp detail and color matter more. (c) For a hunter, seeing a moving shape in near-darkness matters more than seeing perfectly sharp detail. A slightly blurry view beats seeing nothing. (d) Light from the flash reflects off the back of the eye, where a layer called the choroid has a rich blood supply. The blood makes the reflection look red.
Eyeshine comes in many colors, including green, yellow, blue, white, and red, depending on the animal and the viewing angle. Connection: road reflectors and the reflective strips on backpacks use the same idea, sending light back toward its source. Extension: owls and kiwi birds have a tapetum, but squirrels and pigs don’t. Ask students to predict which animals on a list would have one and explain why.
Sources: Wikipedia: Tapetum lucidum; Wikipedia: Red-eye effect
Social Studies
On October 28, 1886, President Grover Cleveland led the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, a gift to the United States from the people of France. French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi designed the statue, and Gustave Eiffel (later famous for the Eiffel Tower) built its metal framework. The statue was built in France, taken apart, packed in crates, and shipped across the Atlantic, arriving in June 1885. Its copper skin is only about 2.4 mm thick. (a) How many years ago was the statue dedicated? (b) Why would the builders take the statue apart instead of shipping it whole? (c) The statue was originally a shiny reddish-brown, like a new penny. By 1906 it had turned green. What do you think happened? (d) The statue stands near the entrance to New York Harbor. Why might it have become a symbol of welcome for people arriving by ship?
Answer and teacher notes
(a) 2026 − 1886 = 140 years. Today is the 140th anniversary. (b) Answers will vary: a statue over 150 feet tall could not fit on any ship; pieces in crates are easier to load, protect, and move; it was going to be reassembled on its pedestal anyway. (c) The copper reacted with air, water, and pollution over many years, forming a green coating called a patina (verdigris). The patina actually protects the copper underneath.
(d) Answers will vary: it was often one of the first things passengers saw as their ships entered the harbor; its torch and raised arm suggest light and hope. In 1903, a plaque with Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus” was placed in the pedestal, connecting the statue with arriving immigrants. Fun fact: the copper statue itself, from its base to the torch, is about 151 feet, roughly half of the 305-foot total; the pedestal and foundation make up the rest. Extension: what other gifts or monuments have countries given to each other, and what message do they send?
Source: Wikipedia: Statue of Liberty (dedication, designers, shipping, copper thickness, patina, and plaque)
Current Events
Do spiders sleep? Researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany studied Portia fimbriata, a small Australian jumping spider about the size of a coin. Using infrared cameras at night, they found evidence of two different stages of sleep. In one stage, the spiders’ eyes moved and their legs twitched, similar to the REM (rapid eye movement) sleep that humans have when we dream. The study was published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (a) A spider that is just sitting still might be resting, not sleeping. The scientists played sounds and measured how fast the spiders reacted. How would that help tell the difference? (b) The team also kept some spiders from sleeping, then watched to see if they slept more afterward. What would that tell scientists? (c) The researchers say their results do not prove that spiders dream. Why not? (d) What is one question you would want to test next?
Answer and teacher notes
(a) A sleeping animal is slower to respond to a disturbance than one that is awake and simply still. If the spiders reacted more slowly during certain quiet periods, those periods are likely sleep. (b) Making up for lost sleep is called sleep rebound. If spiders sleep more after being kept awake, it suggests their bodies need sleep and regulate it, as ours do. (c) The scientists only watched behavior; they didn’t measure brain activity, and no one can ask a spider what it experienced. Eye movements and twitches look like REM sleep but might not work the same way.
(d) Answers will vary: Do other spider species have two sleep stages? Does light at night change spider sleep? What happens in a spider’s brain during the twitching stage? Point out the careful wording scientists used, such as “evidence for” and “resembles,” rather than “proves.” Fun detail from the article: these spiders sleep hanging upside down beneath the silk they spin.
Source: ScienceDaily: Do Spiders Dream? Scientists Just Found a Surprising Clue (University of Bonn; PNAS; October 27, 2026)
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