7 Easy and Effective Bell Ringers to Start Your ELA Class
Bell ringers! Also commonly referred to as class starters, do nows, and warm ups, bell ringers are meaningful activities students complete when they walk in the door. Students can begin working on bell ringers before the bell even rings! And, they continue working until you are ready to start the lesson.
Bell ringers can benefit our middle and high school students in many ways. If you are searching for ways to spice up your current approach or ready to get started with bell ringers when you haven’t used them before, keep reading! I have you covered.
BENEFITS of BELL RINGERS
Organization
I first began incorporating bell ringers when the start of class made my head want to explode. Answering student questions while trying to monitor what everyone else was doing was frustrating and an inefficient use of class time. I needed organization and purpose.
Bell ringers can help students get focused right away. They are a classroom routine that provides stability and predictability. When students know what to do when they enter the room, they can get calm and start being productive.
In order for bell ringers to be as organized as possible, I recommend training students at the beginning of the year… where they can find the task for the day? Your white board? Smart board? Be consistent about having the task up when students enter the room, and this will provide for a smoother start to class (which actually results in a more fluid classroom experience overall, start to finish).
Bell ringers don’t only help with student organization! They can also help teachers take a breath and get in the right mindset to begin working with the next group of students. Bell ringers provide a few minutes to take attendance, confer with readers, respond to pressing emails, or walk around the room to provide support.
Preview
Bell ringers allow us to preview new content. For instance, if you are going to begin a new story, why not project several images on the board and ask students to make a prediction about the theme of the new story based on what they can infer from the images?
Getting ready to begin an essay? Review the importance of the writing process, citation skills, or comma rules.
Review
Class starters also provide a convenient opportunity to spiral review. We can use any type of task or question to continually provide additional practice for core standards. Learning sentence types? Project a sentence on the board, and ask students to identify the parts of speech. Then, have them justify the punctuation in the sentence. Why does the author use this punctuation? How do the parts of the sentence and the punctuation impact the flow?
Example: Rainbows (noun) are (linking verb) beautiful (adjective); I (pronoun) want (verb) one (pronoun). Students may point out that this sentence is choppy. Why? It’s short, consisting of two simple sentences joined with a semicolon. The author may have done this for clarity, but many would find this sentence boring.
The next day, students can come back to this same sentence and revise it to make it more fluid! Have them incorporate whatever grammatical element(s) you are working on at the time.
Example: Rainbows glow proudly in the sky after a dark and moody storm. It may seem odd, but I want to touch one. Here, I’ve added some description, phrases, and even personification. This sentence pairing flows more smoothly and has some personality.
BELL RINGER APPROACHES
To Be Consistent or to Mix it Up?
Some teachers choose to be consistent and use the same type of bell ringer every day. I’ve done this two ways. For one, I have used 10 minutes of independent reading as the common denominator at the beginning of class. This is my favorite! However, I still find that I often follow up this 10 minutes of reading with a different type of “bell ringer” task that is more directed at an ELA skill. (more on this in a minute)
I’ve also started every period consistently with a vocabulary word of the day and corresponding activity. My students have loved every minute of this word work, and I am passionate about showing them the value of language.
Assessing
We have to be careful about “grading” bell ringer work. English teachers have enough on their plates to “grade” without feeling the need to assign points to bell ringers. If we are only doing it for accountability’s sake, we may just want to reconsider the type of work we are doing as bell ringers.
I use bell ringer responses to get an idea of where my students are and what instruction they still need, but I don’t often enter points for their work. This mindset shift has developed slowly, but now I view bell ringers as practice opportunities that inform my teaching.
If you operate in a standards-based system, you could use bell ringers as evidence of proficiency.
BELL RINGER IDEAS
So now! Let’s explore 7 bell ringer ideas that are easy to implement and effective for students.
Disclaimer: I don’t love packets, so these ideas are not digitally or physically combined and neatly stapled together for the whole year. They don’t all look the same or print neatly for binder use. For me, bell ringers are a routine, but variety within them (both in terms of appearance and use) adds enough intrigue that students don’t tire of them…and neither do I! Plus, flexility is freeing.
You can mix and match these ideas to your heart’s delight. (Remember, I always begin with 10 minutes of independent reading. These 7 ideas can follow or precede your independent reading time, if you incorporate it as well.)
Students enjoy learning new words they will see in reading or that they can use while writing. Bell ringers are the perfect opportunity to expand our word banks! Find more details about the word-a-day units my students love here.
1) VOCABUALRY
Students secretly love adding fun new words to their vocabulary bank. When I first began using vocabulary bell ringers, I was shocked by how interested students were in the words. Their sentences were rich, they were engaged in finding synonyms, antonyms, and drawing pictures. And, they began using the words in writing…and even telling me when they came across their words while reading!
As a bell ringer, I typically introduce the word in context. Students practice making inferences about what the word means, using reference materials to verify definitions, and making connections to the word. They even complete a quick word wall activity as a visual reminder of our growing word bank.
This approach is for you IF…you truly want students to learn new words instead of memorizing them.
Allowing students time to record what they’ve read, share their reading, or write about books is a beautiful way to begin a class period. Find this reading ladder here. It’s great for digital and print ELA notebooks.
2) READING UPDATES
After students read for 10 minutes, it is helpful to give them a few minutes to do a number of different tasks that complement independent reading. Consider…
Monday: Discuss (informally with whole class, small groups, or elbow partners)
Tuesday: Update reading ladder
Wednesday: Share book recommendations
Thursday: Share your favorite passage!
Friday: Reading sprints
This approach is for you IF…you feel like there’s never enough time to do the “other things” that enhance independent reading.
Choose each day of the week to highlight a different type of reading practice! These differentiated bookmarks allow for choice and varying degrees of depth of knowledge.
3) READING STRATEGY PRACTICE
I don’t like to tie reading assignments directly to choice reading. Making independent reading feel like there are strings attached de-motivates readers. However, we can use reading strategy practice in a non-invasive way with bell-ringers. Asking a variety of interesting questions that don’t require essay responses, diorama building, or busy work vibes can enhance our understanding of any piece of literature.
To practice reading skills, I’ve used…
The common denominator with most of these practice tasks is that students have choices. They can select the skill they want to work on or the question they want to answer, which increases motivation.
Make these quick! Students can discuss their answers with an elbow partner or enter their answer into a simple Google Form. Don’t forget to laminate bookmarks and task cards so you can reuse them over and over.
This approach is for you IF…you value providing choice and want students to have more opportunities to intentionally process what they are reading.
Mentor sentences from YA lit not only allow for language spiral review…but also provide sneak peeks of high-interest books. Analyze one per day!
4) MENTOR SENTENCES
“The river sounds nice tonight, tripping over stones in the bank as it lulls me to sleep.”
I’ll use this line from the young adult novel Red Queen to explain how we can use mentor sentences as bell ringers. Project the quote on the board, make it accessible digitally, or print it on paper. Then, pair it with thought-provoking questions for students to ponder.
For example:
What do you notice? What stands out?
The author describes the river as tripping over stones. I’ve never thought to describe it that way.
Describe the mood and tone of this line (as it appears in isolation or in context)?
The mood seems peaceful and lethargic. The author’s serene voice draws attention to how tired the character is.
Specifically, what stylistic choices (grammar, figurative language, punctuation, etc) does the author make that create an effect on the reader?
This sentence consists of a simple sentence, a comma, a participle phrase, a prepositional phrase, and a dependent clause. Nice is an understated word, but the author follows the word nice with an unexpected description of the river. Instead of describing its sound, she paints a picture of the river tripping (personification) over the stones.
Now, write your own sentence that follows this pattern!
The music is loud today, knocking on my walls until my parents whisper, “hush.”
Mentor sentences are a quick and effective way to introduce the beauty of writing with short application opportunities. (Plus, we can sneak in some high-interest book plugs!) Use sentences from texts the whole class has read or from those they have not.
This approach is for you IF…you are always and forever searching for ways to integrate and spiral ELA skills.
Task cards are convenient for pretty much…everything! (including bell ringers) These reading comprehension cards can easily be used to review a whole-class text, small group read, or even an independent book.
5) TASK CARDS
When students walk in the room, direct them to take a card from a table or pull up a digital task card. The task card does the rest of the work! I like using task cards for…
discussion prompts
concept reviews
editing goals
grammar practice
vocabulary associations
…and more! You can find a collection of my task cards for a variety of learning goals here. After completing their task card, students can grab another or share their learning with classmates.
Mix it up! If you are wanting to incorporate a little movement right away, hang the task cards around the room or in the hallway so students are standing as they think, walking from one task to another. (This simple format is surprisingly engaging…you’ll just want to make sure to train students not to crowd around the same card!)
This approach is for you IF…you love student-driven learning, collaboration, differentiation, and movement.
Jamboard templates (also compatible with PowerPoint or Google Slides) allow for spiral review of writing skills.
6) JAMBOARDS
Bell ringers should never be a waste of time. We can maximize every precious minute we have with students by using bell ringer time to accomplish any number of tasks.
peer editing
community building
language skills
writing about reading
note taking
You name it! In my building, class periods are 44 minutes. If you ever feel like there just isn’t enough time in the world to accomplish all the things, try Jamboard! It’s is a fun, interactive way to keep students engaged from the moment the bell rings. Jamboard is a Google tool that works beautifully both in person and online. Students can collaborate in groups or work independently while easily viewing one another’s boards.
Save time when lesson planning by having a variety of Jamboard templates on hand.
I’ve written more in depth about Jamboard’s usefulness, specifically with teaching writing, in this blog post.
This approach is for you IF…you like the idea of quick activities students can complete online that highlight a variety of language skills.
7) WRITING PROMPTS
Writing prompts can inspire students. They can be a springboard for class conversations and a powerful way to integrate vocabulary, reading, writing, and grammar. The collaborators at Teachwriting.org have compiled 100 writing prompts for you to draw from throughout the school year. You can grab them for free right here!
Upon download, you’ll find a wide variety of prompts, including narrative, informative, argumentative, creative writing, and mentor sentence topics. There truly is no shortage of ways students can use these prompts. As they write, you have a convenient avenue to confer with students!
This approach is for you IF…you want your students to write every day.
When it comes to bell ringers, almost anything goes. I hope these 7 ideas will serve as a creative springboard for your planning purposes. Finding a routine that helps students get settled, you to get organized, and learning to be meaningful is somewhat of a balancing act. But, once you find your groove, you’ll be doing a happy dance all year long.
SPOTLIGHT RESOURCE:
Older students LOVE these vocabulary bell ringers! Building these in throughout the year provides opportunities for deep conversations about language, context clue work, and so much more.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Melissa is the author of Reading and Writing Haven and a collaborative blogger on Teachwriting.org.
A middle and high school English teacher for over a decade now turned instructional coach, Melissa is an avid reader and writer, and she loves sharing ideas and collaborating with fellow educators. Melissa use her degrees in English, Curriculum & Instruction, and Reading as well as her Reading Specialist certification to ponder today’s educational issues while developing resources to help teachers, students, and parents make learning more relevant, meaningful, and engaging.
Visit Melissa on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter for English teacher camaraderie and practical, engaging teaching ideas.
