Bell ringers are short activities or assignments that students complete while waiting for class to start. They’re an effective way to prime students’ brains for learning and to get them engaged.
They’re easy to implement and can be used anytime of day, from the start of a lesson to after a break or at the end of the day.
Questions of the Day
A bell ringer question is a short task that transitions students into an academic mindset upon arrival to class. These brief tasks help students settle into their seats and allow teachers time to finish attendance and other administrative duties.
These questions help establish consistency in routines while also mixing in a bit of excitement! This collection of September bell ringers provides you with an engaging way to get students thinking and reading from the moment they enter your classroom.
A good question of the day should be specific, thought-provoking and relate to a previous day’s lesson. It can also be a review of a key concept or help introduce a new topic that you may not have covered yet in your curriculum.
Medical Terminology Review
Medical terminology is one of the first things you must learn if you’re preparing for a career in healthcare. If you want to work in radiology, nursing, or as a medical scribe or transcriptionist, it’s critical that you understand this important foundation of the profession.
You’ll need to know what prefixes, suffixes, and root words mean in order to make sense of medical terms. A lot of the words in medicine are based on Latin and ancient Greek languages, but they also follow many of the same structural rules that English language has.
Once you have a grasp on the fundamental roots of medical terminology, it’s time to start breaking words apart. This is known as fracturing, and it’s a great way to help students associate word parts with disciplines or body systems. This will help them better recall the words when they encounter them in the future.
Social Media Use
Bell ringers are brief exercises that students complete while the teacher attends to classroom preparation. They help students settle into an academic mindset and minimize distractions as soon as they enter the classroom, which is a big challenge in today’s hyper-connected world.
Bellringers can include short vocab quizzes or practice problems to refresh students’ minds on important terms they learned in prior lessons. They also include interesting questions that get students thinking.
If you’re teaching Social Media Use, consider using a bell ringer that gets students thinking about the benefits and downsides of using social media to communicate with friends and family. This might include asking a question about irresponsible social media use or having students discuss the importance of avoiding trolls on social media.
To make your bell ringer activity truly engaging, incorporate metacognitive strategies to extend learning through curiosity, prediction, and metacognition (CPM). These strategies work by sparking student interest, encouraging predictions about their learning, and enhancing retention of new information.
Disease or Disorder Symptoms
Symptoms are the changes in normal bodily function that occur when an illness occurs. Symptoms may be remitting, which mean they are improving or go away on their own without treatment; chronic, which means they persist for a long time; and relapsing, which are symptoms that come back.
Almost all disease processes have symptoms. They range from the most common, such as fever, to more rare, like a ringing in the ear.
Some of these signs can be measured by doctors, who can use devices and techniques to assess them. They may be able to tell when a patient has high blood pressure, or clubbing of the fingers.
Another key sign is a skin rash. This can indicate eczema or other diseases.
Bell’s palsy is a disorder that occurs when a virus infects the nerve that makes the face to smile and causes acute facial paralysis on one side. Usually, it develops within hours or days of the initial viral infection but can take up to a month for full recovery.