Bellwork can be time-consuming for teachers in three ways.
- Prep: It’s an extra activity you must add to your lesson planning– every day.
- Class time: Bellwork can detract from your main lesson, and it may feel like you need more time to accomplish your goals in a class period.
- Grading: If you want students to take bellwork assignments seriously, you need to bring accountability with grading. Grading takes up time outside of the classroom.
Connect the bell work to your overall goal for the day
There’s no reason that you can’t start achieving learning goals with your students as soon as the bell rings. Bell work is the perfect opportunity to conduct pre-assessment with your students. You can also use it to capture their interest in a topic, so they are more focused when the official lesson begins.
Review prior knowledge to make lessons more successful
You can use bell work to work backward if you know what skills you want to assess at the end of a lesson. For students to master the skills of the day, they may need to review some prior knowledge. Bell work is perfect for this.
Use what you have
Stop trying to create a new bell work activity each day. Try using resources that you already have by using PDFs, worksheets, and other practice activities. Use TeacherMade to take portions of longer activities and use these traditional materials as online digital activities.
Think of bell work as part of the lesson
Planning bell work each day can be a timely addition to your day. Instead, think of bell work as the beginning or intro to your daily lesson. When you start viewing it as an extension of your learning targets, lesson planning becomes simplified.
Auto-grade bell work
Stop grading your bell work assignments by hand. When you automate your bellwork grading, you gain time and a better understanding of student knowledge. With TeacherMade’s auto-grade feature, you can assign digital bell work and get instant results as your student complete the assignment.
You can adjust your lesson to cover the learning areas that your students need most.
Shrink the transition between bell work and your lesson
If you dread wasting class time because of how students transition between activities, TeacherMade’s slide view is the solution to this problem.
With TeacherMade’s Slide View, you can integrate online bellwork assignments into your lesson. You can transition directly into your lesson without toggling between apps, collecting papers, or doing any other time-suck activities inside your classroom.
