High School Classroom Bell-Ringers, Lesson Ideas for Teachers, Start Strong Each Class Period

bell ringers warmups do nows sponges because they soak up every minute of class I don't care what you call them you want to use them everyone today I want to talk about the importance of establishing routine in your classroom so that your teenagers know what to expect as you start class each day I call these bell ringers there's lots of different terms for them but basically I found that if I have the same thing starting class each day the kids really respond well to it because they know it to expect in this unpredictable world I think kids actually crave routine and so what we're doing each day in class will vary quite widely but the way I start class each day of the week is always the same and so the kids know what to expect it works for them because they hit the ground running I'd say even before the tardy bill maybe a third to half the class is already seated and taking down notes and getting ready for my part of the bell ringer or presentation but then also it gives me a couple of minutes at the beginning of class to take attendance so every campus I've worked on the attendance ladies always need that submitted via the computer within the first five minutes of class and I if I don't have a bell ringer I scribble it down on a post-it note and I never have time to go back to the computer and turn it in so a bell ringer gives me that little couple of minutes that I need to take care of the attendance ladies because you all know you do not want to get school secretaries irritated with you you want to be like on the good side at the school secretary so bell ringers are one way to take care of what you need to take care of and give the teenagers what they need so the way it works is depending on my schedule so when I was in California I was on a five a traditional five day a week schedule and I'll talk about that one first and then I'll talk about how I modified it for the ad block so on the traditional traditional schedule I did mug shots on Mondays and that's mechanics usage and grammar and every Monday I would have two sentences up on the board that the kids edit and we go over the edits so it's just a proofreading editing practice I have a link down there where I model a mug shot so you can see what that looks like so if you haven't seen that grammar video go back and check that one out every Tuesday we start with lit term Tuesday where I would project a definition the kids write down in their notes and then while I'm taking attendance and then I come in and I give modern examples to show them how those literary techniques and devices work in real life and then the kids offer examples from stories they know Wednesday's are always vocab words on Wednesday where we go over five vocab words there SAT level words where the kids are writing down notes and I'm telling stories that kind of relate to that word to kind of help it and print into their brain and we talked about synonyms and antonyms for each of those words in their parts of speech so we go deep on five words instead of just doing a drive-by on ten words Thursday's I actually don't use a bell ringer when I'm on a traditional schedule it's almost like you need a break you need routine and then you need a break from the routine and toward the end of the week on Thursdays I'm always kind of racing to get everything done I've usually tabled something that we need to finish up on Thursday so Thursday's are all about content and the Fridays we launch with either a quarter Trio competition game where it's a every nine weeks the quarter I put kids in groups of three trios and there's a series of competitions brain teasers games you know trivia there's all kinds of little little things that I have them do I'll put a link down there for that blog post as well so we either have a trivia a quarter tree a quarter trios not a trivia a quarter trios competition there it is or a vocab quiz to start Friday and then most of Friday is always SSR sustained silent reading where my kids sit and read for 45 minutes a pleasure book of their choice that they then report to me every nine weeks we take care of that assignment so that's my week it's mug shot Monday lit term Tuesday Ward's on Wednesday take a break on Thursday and just get stuff done and then SSR Friday's after a vocab quiz or a quarter Trio game now that worked great in California and then I moved up to Idaho where they use the 90-minute ad block so what I ended up doing to make it work there is I got rid of the alliterative names because the way the calendar flows not every mug shot always falls on a Monday right it might be a Wednesday so I ended up doing is just in a cycle of three so I still kept mugs it's lit terms and words but I didn't call it words on Wednesday it was just words and so every third class session they had one of those and they kept doing the same note-taking that we did with the others four SS are on the Block guys I hope that's audio didn't get messed up I'm sorry for SS are on the block it wasn't always a Friday sometimes it was a Thursday but it was the last class I see you each week that's when we do the SSR so either Thursday or Friday and then because it's a 90-minute block it's only the last 45 minutes that's when we do the reading now you can do bell ringers in a really wide variety there's tons of great ideas out there if use Google you know bell ringer or a do now or warm-ups or sponge activities you'll find lots of great stuff some teachers do SSR reading as their bell ringer every single day and the kids bring their books and they read for 10 minutes and then they put the books away and then they get on with the business of the day and they love that I've heard really great things about that that approach never really worked well for me just because I don't like reading books that way it's like I'm almost about to really get into something and now you're telling me to put that book away and then totally shift gears and I just didn't like that and I also like SSR for an extended amount on Fridays just because that gives me as the teacher time to conference I do Writers Workshop and I work helping remediate grammar skills with individual kids in that time and if I don't have that dedicated time I don't ever get to meet one-on-one with kids like there's just no time to manage an entire class of 34 and have it depends at conferences that's just never gonna happen so SSR allows that to happen for me but if you love 10-minute SSR as your bell ringer great if it's working for you another thing I've heard teachers do is journaling so they'll have the writing prompt of the day projected up as the kids come in and they'll have a spiral book or one of those composition notebooks and they're just doing a free write response to whatever the prompt is and then the teacher collects them every so often that approach is wonderful in terms of getting kids to write and to write a lot and you probably know Freedom Writers and all that good stuff for me it's it's kind of a management it's crunchy for me because I feel like I need to read every single one of them in case a kid has given some kind of personal and troubling information in a journal which is great that they feel open with me to share that but if they put it in a notebook and I don't see it for two weeks or if I'm skimming the notebooks and I miss that I would feel terrible if a kid was using that as a way to reach out to me and I missed it so since I don't have the time to go through daily journal entries for you know whether they're 34 kids in a class multiple classes it's for me a management problem so I haven't done the journaling but I have her that's really successful especially if you have smaller classes I actually use journals back in California way a long time ago when we had classes of 20 students to one teacher and that was awesome those were the halcyon days of my career but now with so many kids it's just really hard to manage that but that doesn't mean there's other things you can't do besides even what I do so I made a list here that I'm gonna look at real quick you could do test prep as one of your bell ringers like let's say you have the s back the the Common Core test coming up or Park or I teks in Texas Tek s I hope I'm saying that right or even if you have older kids SAT prep practice where you just take out two released questions have the kids answer them themselves and then you go over the correct answers together you could have just brain teasers you could just have like thinking Thursday's where you just give a brain teaser they meet in small groups they think it through and then you reveal the answer after you've taken attendance you could have I in the spring semester sometimes I use commonly confused words those are homophones and so I have slides for that and then we talk about which when do use effect and when you use effect you know those ones that trip them up you could also just project current events just get a paragraph or just a short little article that you've projected you don't even have to make the photocopies the kids read that while you're taking the attendance and then we discuss it so lots of different things you've done you could do some teachers have like long lists of YouTube videos that they are like conversation starters so they'll play the five-minute YouTube video and in the class will debrief so lots of things where you want to do it if you go online you can find there's tons and tons of these already made TPT has some of course I have some in my shop you can just like searching you find lots you also though could get together with your grade level like say all sophomore teachers get together and you guys are going to jigsaw it you know like I'll make all the grammar piece you make all the vocab piece you know Sheila will make all the current event pieces you know whatever it is and then you just come together and share your resources might be a nice way to get all of those bell ringers taken care of and one fell swoop whatever you end up doing I wanna I want to really encourage you to think about adding bell ringers to your routine if this is not something you're already doing I know it's a common practice and I'm just telling folks I love it it is fast I would say you try to cap the bell ringer to about 10 minutes once it goes past 10 minutes it's becoming like a little big lesson so you want it short you know succinct you want to have some sort of piece of accountability so in my world that I collect the mug shots every five rounds and I grade them and then all of the content the mug shots the lit terms the words on Wednesday are part of the semester final exam so the kids have to have their notes in order to study for the exam they can always come back and recopy their notes from my slides I don't have a problem with that but they need to take their good notes so they have access to it and of course we have vocab quizzes like twice a month and that's based on the words on Wednesday slides but there needs to be some kind of piece of accountability um even if it's just completion points because if there's not they're not going to do it you know they're gonna zone out or just daydream or pretend to write when they're not writing so definitely hold their feet to the fire with that sometimes I get asked if my bell ringers connect to the daily lesson and not usually sometimes there's a nice little happenstance where it all lines up and we were talking about irony yeah you know and then oh today's story is the necklace but they may pull some hahaha that's French song but usually they don't and I don't have time to strategize them all lining up they really are just independence and alone class starters so that's it yeah I use bell ringers I love them it's a it's great for you in terms of classroom management and time management and starting you know with a you know on a strong note getting class going not like not having to talk over everybody as they're you know trying to settle in for the first few minutes they're already settled in they're ready to go it's really good for them because it's circling around on basic skills that you might not be able to fold in any other way it's short so their attention span can sort of swallow it you know kind of hang on to it um and honestly it's a way for them to boost their grades with what are relatively easy points in my class which is not an easy class so the kids like it because it buoys they're great so yeah did I mention I you peace I also like them because I can just make copies of the slide packs for kids with IEP s so if kids have trouble with note-taking or like visual memory I just print off a whole pack for that kid at the beginning of the semester and then he can just take the notes on the printouts that I've already given them so it's a nice way to differentiate as well okay that's it for me this time you guys I hope you have a great summer I'll be back sometime soon with more goodies as we're getting ready for the new year alright see you soon hi everyone [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Laura Randazzo

Views: 38,720

Keywords: teachers, lesson plans, lesson planning, high school lesson ideas, high school, middle school, secondary, bell ringer ideas, sponge activities, do nows, class warmups

Id: WBIU-LWlg8A

Length: 12min 36sec (756 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 07 2018