Bell Work in Spanish Class

Here’s why I love Bell Ringers in my Spanish class:
1) It gets the student working as soon as the come in the room.
2) It’s a great way to get students to use their notes and practice using the language.
3) It allows the teacher a few minutes to do things such as attendance or check in with students.
4) It serves as a solid routine to start the class.

My bell work, which I call Entradas, are a good to teach students to reference their notes. At the beginning of the year, a lot of students look at the question and when they don’t know a word, they just stop. I have to constantly remind them to look in their notes. When we are going over the answers and a student doesn’t know an answer, I make them look back in their notes to find each word until they understand the question.

This week our focus was on the verbs: Can, Want, and Need:

Entrada para la clase de español

On the first day, it took students a little longer to answer the questions, but by the end of the week, they didn’t need to rely on their notebooks so much and could answer the questions rather quickly.

We’ve got a powerpoint recently updated with over 100 Bell Ringers ready to use.
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Another idea that we’ve recently implemented is from The Creative Language Classroom, “Let them Welcome Each Other to Class“. Each week one student from each class is Assign a profe in each class selected as “Profe de la semana”. After we go over our bell work, the profe gets to ask the typical daily questions, such as ¿Qué día es hoy? ¿Qué hora es? ¿Cuál es la fecha de hoy? and other questions related to the particular unit. Students are excited to answer questions asked by the new “teacher” and I’m more than happy to sit back and enjoy the break from asking these questions every day!