The bellringer is often helpful to running your classroom. It gives you time to get a few things done, such as attendance and missing work. It is also very useful in helping students review material that is critical to the day's lesson.
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But if you are not careful, it can take up too much of your time and reduce the time spent teaching the new content. Using too much time can be incredibly harmful to your classroom dynamic. You can end up with frustrated students, too little time spent on new content, and a rushed feeling causing you to forget to pause and evaluate the understanding of your students.
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But with a few strategies, you can be sure the bellringer time is a time to review previous material without taking over your whole class. The whole process should take no more than 7-8 minutes.
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These strategies have helped many of my clients gain control of their classrooms and obtain valuable instruction time.
It sets the tone that every minute is valued and that I want them to succeed, and be sure to share that with your students! Once the timer is up, we quickly go over the problems. I call on students and keep things moving along.
If the instruction takes longer, IĀ cut the number of questions and reduce their work time to keep within my 7-8 minutes. If it consistently takes longer, see No. 5 below.
This strategy is one of my favorites. I allow my students to choose any two of the problems from the problem set. I try to offer different difficulty levels for my students. For this bellringer -- reviewing literal equations -- Nos. 1 and 4 will be simpler. I would bring that to their attention and challenge them to try Nos. 2 or 3.
Amazingly, most students will choose the harder problems. I had to spend more time telling them that it was okay to pick the easier ones at first to get used to how much time they have to complete the task.
Naturally, I still had that one hour where everyone chose the easiest problems. But most kids, most the time, will pick appropriate problems for their level. If I know I need more instruction time for a given lesson, I have them pick only one question.
For most of my classes, I will choose one student for each problem to come and put their worked-out answer on the board. We always give a "thank you" to those students as a class, and everyone writes down the problem. So, even if they were not able to complete each question individually, we provide them with worked-out answers. Afterward, I take a few questions, and we move on to our lesson.
Sometimes within a class, you have a few students less prepared than others. These students can get frustrated because they don't have the skills to complete the work and can hold up the class because they want to understand. This circumstance can often be the most frustrating!
What teacher does not want to help an eager learner? But, in the long run, this is stealing time from the goal of the day and is giving this struggling student even less time to learn new content.
Strategy 1: Use a Timer
I usually begin with this strategy in the fall: a simple timer that creates urgency. I prefer egg timer for its ease of use. I know there are many out there, but this one will get you started without a getting caught in the Google search vortex. I give my students five minutes that begin promptly at the beginning of the class period. I like to display this on my whiteboard. It is clean and straightforward with nothing to distract my students.
Strategy 2: Just Pick 2

A bellringer involving reviewing critical equations.
Strategy 3: Partner Work

How you display egg timer in a white board? In my classroom the smart board is on the side by the end of the classroom while the white board is in the front? The whiteboard has to be connect to computer of an projector?