23 Bell Ringers Teachers Love

Class has begun, but students may still be chatting with friends, thinking about what happened last period, or rummaging through backpacks. A well-chosen bell ringer—like an error to hunt for in a worked problem, or a question about who deserves the most blame in Romeo and Juliet, or a historical photograph packed with details to investigate—can help students settle in and give them something engaging to quickly turn their attention to.  

The strongest bell ringers, teachers say, do more than just occupy students while they take attendance. Used thoughtfully, they can reactivate prior knowledge, preview the day’s learning, and lay the groundwork for lively discussions. “Your bell ringer should be intentional and support your lesson, not just busy work,” writes middle school teacher Barry Forbes on Facebook. 

We asked you to share your favorite bell-ringers—the activities you find yourself returning to again and again. Nearly 400 educators responded, and the question was viewed nearly 300,000 times across our social platforms.

The following teacher-tested activities vary in length and format and can be adapted across subjects, grade levels, and classroom needs. 

1. Which One Doesn’t Belong: Earth science teacher Emily May gives students four vocabulary terms—such as “evaporation,” “condensation,” “sublimation,” and “freezing,”—and asks them to decide which one doesn’t belong and explain why. Because there isn’t always “one correct answer,” students must think carefully about how the concepts relate. 

2. My Favorite No: Give students a math problem to solve independently and anonymously on an index card or sticky note. Collect their work and sort into piles of right answers (“Yes”) and wrong answers (“No”). Pick out a “No” that demonstrates a common error and discuss with the class how to go about correcting it. 

3. Flash Philosophy: Pose a moral or ethical question related to the day’s lesson—such as “Should we follow laws we believe are morally wrong?”—and give students a few minutes to write a one or two-sentence response. Randomly pair students to go over answers together, then close with a brief class discussion, suggests high school teacher Benjamin Barbour. 

4. Mindful Journaling: Give students a few quiet minutes to write or draw freely in their notebooks. Elementary teacher Donna Paul uses gentle sentence starters like “One thing I’m noticing this morning…” or “Today, I’m feeling…” to help students settle into class and check in with themselves.

5. Inside-Outside Circle: Educator and instructional specialist Christopher Tobin has students form two circles facing each other, then gives them a question to discuss with the person across from them. After a minute or two, one circle rotates to create new pairs, giving students a chance to hear several perspectives on the same prompt. Tobin asks students to end each exchange by acknowledging something they appreciated or learned from their partner’s perspective, using the activity to strengthen classroom relationships, too. 

6. Mystery Number: Add a little intrigue to math review by giving students a series of clues that point them towards a specific number. Some clues might be equations to solve, while others test their understanding of concepts: “It’s a negative multiple of 5” or “It’s less than -8.” Students work in small groups to identify the one number that satisfies every clue, then check their reasoning as a class. “Kids love solving mysteries,” says middle school math teacher Nick Rhoades, “even if it’s about math.”

7. Rankings: High school English teacher Christina Torres Cawdery taps into the fact that her students “enjoy being a little judgey” by asking them to rank ideas related to what they’re studying. While reading Romeo and Juliet, for example, students might use a sticky note to rank characters according to how much responsibility they bear for the tragedy, then defend their choices. 

8. Collaborative Brain Dumps: Get students retrieving the previous day’s learning by asking small groups to write down everything they remember on a whiteboard or sheet of paper. One student begins, then passes it to a classmate to add anything they missed. The board or paper continues around the group until everyone has contributed—ensuring “every single student is engaged in that thinking,” says Meg Lee, co-founder of Learning Science Partners.

9. String of Synonyms: To help students explore the subtle differences between related words, draw a vertical scale with five to seven notches and write a word like lonely near the middle. Students take turns adding synonyms above or below it depending on whether they carry stronger or weaker connotations, then discuss and defend each placement. The activity helps students recognize shades of meaning rather than treating all synonyms as interchangeable, explains teacher Michelle Krause on Facebook.

10. Quiz-Quiz Trade: To gauge students’ prior knowledge, middle school health teacher Mackenzie Smith starts class with a short prompt on a sticky note, such as “What are three things you can do to prioritize your mental health?” Students pair up, share their responses, and ask each other follow-up questions before trading notes and finding new partners. After a few rounds, students share the most interesting responses they encountered, exposing the class to a wider range of ideas and perspectives. 

11. Morning Classroom Jobs: Let students start the day with practical classroom jobs that build responsibility, belonging, and connection to the classroom. In Paul’s elementary classroom, these morning tasks might include watering plants, organizing shelves, or helping prepare instructional materials for the day.

12. Find the Mistake: Work out a problem on the board but include one deliberate error for students to find and correct. This doesn’t only work for math class. Civics teacher Eiza Aurangzaib, for example, provides an answer to a question like: “What are similarities and differences of the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of the government?” and introduces a purposeful error (“the executive branch makes laws”). Searching for the error gets students discussing relevant material right at the start of class and reasoning through why the answer is wrong, she writes on Facebook. 

13. Think-Notice-Wonder: Project an intriguing image and ask students, “What do you see, notice, think, and wonder?” Teacher Carin Shaffer, for example, might display a microscopic image of a tardigrade—an eight-legged creature often referred to as a “water bear”—and have students record their observations and questions. Students then share what they noticed as a class, and Shaffer walks them through some of the questions their curiosity generated. 

14. Board Splash: High school English teacher Karla Hilliard posts an open-ended question on the board related to the day’s content, then has students come up and write their responses around the question. For example: “When should a character be held responsible for the unintended consequences of their choices?” After everyone contributes, she invites students to highlight a response that challenged or extended their thinking and discuss why with the class. 

15. Grammar Checks: Immerse kids in a text with quick grammar practice. Choose a sentence from a novel, story, or play they're reading, and create several grammatical errors. For example,  introduce capitalization, punctuation, or verb tense mistakes into the text, and invite students to copy them down and rewrite them correctly. “Not only do they learn standard grammar,” says teacher Paul Holimon on Instagram, “they learn the editing process.”

16. Silent Reading: Give students five to ten minutes to settle in with a book of their choice. The lack of pressure or expectations “calms everyone down and creates a quiet environment after the stimulation of transition,” writes teacher Whitney Drew Renner on Facebook. 

17. Math Day: Math teacher Susan Clark Russo uses the date as a warmup problem. On August 26, for example, she asks her seventh-graders to write the fraction 8/26 in 3 different ways, her eighth-graders to name four points that lie on the line y=8x+26,  and her Algebra students to solve 8x-26 = 20x-26.

18. Rose, Thorn, Bud: Get to know students by asking them to note one thing that's going well, one thing that's not going well, and one thing they’re looking forward to, suggests teacher Barbara Bitgood on Facebook. Students can either answer verbally in a discussion or complete the prompts in writing.  

19. SAT Prep: Help high schoolers prep for the SAT with low-stakes questions straight from the exam. After students respond to the question in groups, go over the answer and strategies they could have used to solve for it. High school teacher Jessica Safreed Thomas has used this bell ringer for two years and shared on Facebook that 60 percent of her students say it is  “helpful for them on the SAT.” 

20. Heat Warm-Ups: High school math teacher Jennifer Feehan gives students four problems that gradually increase in difficulty, from a basic computation to a more rigorous application of a concept. Students spend the first few minutes of class solving them in any order they’d like. 

21. Artifacts: Project an artifact from the period students are studying—such as a photograph, piece of clothing, or tool—and ask what historians could learn from it, as well as what it might leave unanswered. To make the exercise more personal, Barbour also asks what future historians might infer from students’ own clothing, school supplies, or household objects.

22. Quick Sorts: Pass out cards with terms from the current unit and ask students to sort them into categories on a graphic organizer. After learning about the demographic transition model, for example, students in Jess Quiggle’s social studies class sort terms like “high birth rate” and “negative population growth” into the model’s corresponding stages. Review the completed sort together as a class. 

23. Art Observation: Turn the lights off, turn music on, and project a slide of a highly detailed image connected to the day’s learning. Students might examine John Gast’s 1872 painting American Progress in history class; The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali for art class; or Photo 51 taken by Rosalin Franklin and Raymond Gosling for biology class. Ask students to list as many important details as they can spot—in art history teacher Phaedra Jean Taylor’s class, the longest list wins.