Need a New Bellringer? Try These 4 Warm Up Activities

We both made a lot of mistakes our first year teaching (who doesn’t?). But Steph is really glad that her disastrous attempt to teach grammar for a full period taught her the value of a good bellringer.

The bellringer seems like such a small thing, even optional: who cares if you have a little activity that takes up the first 10 minutes of a class period?

But a good bellringer is an essential tool in effective classroom management. We love a routine, and using a bellringer helped our students know exactly what to do when they got to class each day. A bellringer breaks up the class period—it’s rare that most teenagers want to spend a full class period on one reading or writing activity. And (most importantly?) a bellringer gives you a few minutes to deal with all the administrative tasks that come your way: taking attendance, checking homework, dealing with tardies, answering 5000 supposedly urgent questions, checking in with students returning from an absence.

For many years, grammar was our go-to bellringer. We created grammar packets that students knew to have out on their desks when the bell rang. After a quick mini-lesson, we had a few minutes to take care of administrative tasks while students worked, and this was a necessary part of our preparation for the California High School Exit Exam. 

But when the CAHSEE was eliminated as a graduation requirement and our school adopted 1:1 Chromebooks, we had more freedom to experiment and address other skills our students needed to practice.

As with most things, it took a few years of revision (and a global pandemic that forced us online) to create a bellringer system we loved. It’s relatively low-maintenance, has elements of personalization and student choice, frees us up to take care of all those little administrative tasks, and (most) students don’t hate it. Are you in? We thought so.

Our Bellringer Basics

Each week, we created our weekly agenda page on Canvas, and right on top was a bellringer “menu” students worked on for the first 10–15 minutes of each class period. The assignments were all due at the end of the school day on Fridays, and students received participation points for completing each activity.

Students could work in any order they liked (which many students appreciated), but we always provided recommended pacing on our daily agenda for students who needed more guidance.

Each week, students were required to complete:

Bellringer #1: Typing Club

When our school transitioned to 1:1 devices, we quickly realized that our students are terrible typists. Typing may no longer be a required class (don’t get us started), but our digital world requires us to type everything, and students who don’t know how to touch-type are at a huge disadvantage inside and outside the classroom.

Determined to address this problem, we found a free website called Typing Club that uses videos, games (with a ninja!), and interactive lessons to guide students through every key on the keyboard and increase their speed. While there are almost 700 lessons available, we usually made it to about 400.

Pro Tip: We recommend the School Edition. It’s still free, but you’ll get a customized URL that makes it much easier to track student progress. The free version is limited to three classes, so we just created one class for each course we taught.

Students had to complete ten lessons each week, earning 5/5 stars (to ensure they were doing it right, not just racing through), a reasonable goal for most students. While it was impossible to ensure every student was using correct touch-typing form, the farther students got, the harder it became to pass the lessons without using proper form. (Which we emphasized from lesson one, but as with so many things, hindsight is often 20/20.) At the end of each week, we could generate a report showing each student’s activity.

Many students loved Typing Club: we had students who would practice typing whenever they got bored (pretty much every sophomore teacher on campus knew all about Typing Club), even when we limited the lessons they had access to (which we highly recommend). It was encouraging to see our students improve, and it was something all students, regardless of language proficiency or writing ability, could succeed at.

Bellringer #2: Quill Grammar

Quill is free (there is a paid version, but we never found it necessary), but you’ll need to create a teacher account to assign lessons and track your students’ progress. While there are many resources for full-class instruction, we wanted to use it as a self-paced activity. Not only did this free us up to take care of other tasks, but it allowed us to differentiate instruction so each student got practice based on their individual needs.

We started by assigning each student a diagnostic. For our sophomores, many of whom were far below grade level, we started with the ELL Starter Baseline Diagnostic, but when we taught Honors and AP, we started with the Starter Baseline Diagnostic. (We only required honors and AP students to complete three lessons a week: they generally performed better on the diagnostics, so we preferred they not burn through their lessons too quickly).

When students take a diagnostic, Quill recommends personalized lessons based on their performance. Once you assign those lessons, students work through them at their own pace. Because students’ recommendations were personalized, they ran out at different times, so we just assigned them the next diagnostic when they were ready.

Quill takes a sentence-combining approach to grammar. Each lesson begins with a quick review (1–2 screens), and then students complete 5–10 practice problems. If they make any mistakes, they receive personalized feedback, and once they write the sentence correctly, they see a screen with other ways they could have correctly written the sentence. (Added bonus: Students have to type full sentences, which reinforces their typing practice!)

Quill now also offers Reading for Evidence lessons that require students to read a short text, highlight evidence to support a specified point, and write (and revise) evidence-based sentences about their reading.

We required students to do well enough on each lesson to turn the icon green (instead of red or yellow), which meant that if they made too many mistakes the first time through, they had to go back and repeat the lesson. This allowed us to hold students to a minimum level of proficiency instead of allowing them to click their way through the assignment. Like Typing Club, we could generate a report each week that showed at a glance whether students had met the requirement.

While students didn’t enjoy Quill as much as they did Typing Club, they did make progress throughout the year, even if it was just in asking for help when they needed it.

Bellringer #3: Vocabulary Kahoots

We used to assign vocabulary regularly, requiring students to make flashcards and take a quiz every two weeks. After many years of this, however, we got frustrated: a disproportionate amount of our time and students’ grades was devoted to this one, relatively minor, activity.

So, instead of quizzing students every two weeks, we created two Kahoots for each set of words (one where students saw the word and chose the definition; one where students saw the definition and chose the word), and we started assigning these Kahoots for two weeks in a row, using the self-paced option rather than the live full-class option. As a bonus, we gave the top 5 students on the leaderboard extra credit.

At the end of the semester, we still gave a traditional vocabulary final, but this way students were practicing for participation points and only taking one test on the words each semester: it felt like a much more appropriate allotment of our time and their grade.

In our honors and AP classes, we still assigned two Kahoots each week, but instead of vocabulary, they were about literary terms and common biblical and mythological allusions. This way, students could continue to build their cultural and literary analysis toolkits, but it didn’t take up a significant amount of valuable class time.

Bellringer #4: First Chapter Friday Nearpod

Finally, students completed a First Chapter Friday Nearpod each week. Originally, we read a chapter aloud as students listened, but we switched to using Nearpods during the pandemic and found it an easy way to make First Chapter Friday part of the bellringer menu. Each Nearpod includes a book trailer, an excerpt with both audio and video, and 2–3 multiple-choice questions to hold students accountable for completing the activity.

We loved providing students with regular recommendations (and seeing them occasionally read those recommendations), and the Nearpod reports made it easy to assign a quick grade.

Managing Bellringer Make-Up Work

When we initially started our bellringer menu, we’d have students working super far ahead or making up dozens of lessons at a time, and it made tracking the weekly activities a nightmare. So, we switched to only giving credit for the assigned lessons each week and then giving students an “extra credit” week at the end of each grading period: the menu stayed the same, but it wasn’t required, so if students had missed a week, they could make up for it, and if they were on top of things, they could earn some extra credit (or enjoy a week off).

This bellringer system worked so well for us: our students regularly practiced all those small things that are a part of our curriculum without taking up tons of class time. Many students appreciated the freedom to work at their own pace and have something to work on when they finished classwork early, we appreciated the opportunity to check in with students, and it proved to be a valuable use of time for all of us. If you have questions we haven’t answered here, please email us at hello@threeheads.works or DM us on Instagram @threeheads.works.