Plan a week of Do Now starters that actually compound

Plan a week of Do Now starters that actually compound

Do Nows are the cheapest, highest-leverage four minutes in the day. They are also the first thing to drift into wordsearch territory when you are planning on a Sunday night and just need them done. This prompt gives you five for the week, designed as a ladder, in one pass.

The prompt

You are helping me plan five Do Now retrieval starters for next week.

CONTEXT
- Year level: [YEAR LEVEL]
- Subject: [SUBJECT]
- New concept I will be teaching this week: [THIS WEEK'S CONCEPT]
- Concept I taught last week that I want to keep warm: [LAST WEEK'S CONCEPT]
- Concept from earlier in the term I want to bring back into rotation: [OLDER CONCEPT]
- Time per starter in class: 4 to 5 minutes, including the answer check

CONSTRAINTS
- Use Australian English and ACARA-style language. No US grade levels.
- Each starter must be doable on paper or a mini whiteboard. No tech required.
- Each starter must have a worked answer key for the teacher, not just the answer.
- Do not soften the cognitive demand across the week. Vary the surface, not the difficulty.

TASK
Produce five Do Nows, one for each day Monday to Friday, structured as a ladder:
- Monday: three quick recall questions on last week's concept, surfacing the
  misconceptions you would expect a real [YEAR LEVEL] student to still hold.
- Tuesday: one applied problem on last week's concept that requires the student
  to transfer it to a new surface.
- Wednesday: a mixed set, two on last week's concept and one on the older concept,
  to test whether last week stuck once a few days have passed.
- Thursday: a low-stakes preview of this week's new concept, framed as a noticing
  prompt rather than a question with a single right answer.
- Friday: a synthesis question that asks the student to connect last week, the
  older concept, and this week's new concept in one short response.

For each day, give me:
1. The starter exactly as it should appear on the board, in plain student-facing
   language.
2. The expected answer or answer range, with the most likely wrong answer and
   why a student would give it.
3. One sentence I can say if the room is silent after 60 seconds.

End with one line telling me which day you think will be the hardest to land,
and why.

What it does well

It treats Do Nows as a sequence rather than five disconnected micro-tasks, which is the whole point of retrieval practice and the bit teachers usually skip when they are tired. Asking for the most likely wrong answer per question is what makes the output usable when a student actually misses it.

Where it falls over

If you give it a fuzzy concept ("algebra", "persuasive writing") it will give you fuzzy starters. The prompt is only as good as the specificity of your three concepts. Also, it does not know what your students did last week, so if your "last week's concept" line is wrong, the whole ladder leans the wrong way.

Try it like this

For Year 8 maths: "this week's concept" is solving two-step linear equations, "last week's" is one-step, "older" is integer operations. You will get a ladder that catches sign errors on Wednesday.

For VCE Biology Unit 3: "this week's" is the stages of the signal transduction pathway, "last week's" is receptor types, "older" is the structure of the plasma membrane. The Friday synthesis question is the one to look at first.

For Year 10 English: "this week's" is analysing tone in a persuasive piece, "last week's" is identifying the contention, "older" is the language of appeals. Use the Thursday noticing prompt as a soft entry, not a cold call.

If a starter feels off when you read it, change one specific word in your context line and run it again rather than rewriting the output by hand.