Bell Work and Settling Starters

Teaching in 10 different classrooms this year has given me a lot of challenges. This is compounded by the fact that I am never teaching in the same classroom for consecutive lessons. This means that I often, particularly if the lesson is directly following on from another, arrive at the same time as the pupils.

This has meant it has been incredibly difficult to keep to a classroom routine. If you are lucky enough to have your own classroom, you can have the lesson on the board before the pupils come in, their books are always in the same place, and they know where to find resources they may need. Your computer will be up and running, and you should be able to have a smooth start to your lesson.

In my case, I often have to log on, wait for the computer to load up before I can put my lesson on the board, find my pupils books, which have often been moved, or, in the case of one class, I am continually carrying from classroom to classroom, furnish unprepared pupils with pens, rulers etc, and get the lesson started. We all know that the first ten minutes of the lesson can be make or break, so I've had to work on some strategies to deal with my situation.

One of the most crucial strategies I use is a bellwork task, or a settling starter, as I have also heard it called. The pupils line up outside the door, and I quickly nip in, find their books, log on to the computer, and grab theri starter. Because of the computer issue, it is always on paper. As they enter the room, each pupil receives their starter activity. Pupils without pens can then be quickly sorted out, and usually, by the time they are finishing this task, the computer has loaded and two helpful pupils have given the books out. The task can be glued into books, and we start off by saying that we have already completed one task.

So, what are the kind of things we do? We all know from looking at the Ofsted Criteria, that pupils have to be learning and making progress from the moment they come into the room, but I have to admit that sometimes that progress is being able to settle down quickly and quietly. The tasks are always linked to the content of the lesson, but that might not always be clear from the outset.

Ideas are:

• Punctuation activities
• Words to describe a person - you might have a character from a book, a photo of a celebrity etc. and pupils have to find vocabulary to describe them and write it on the sheet.
• Writing imagery to describe a setting
• Using keywords in a sentence
• Crack the code activities to find the learning objective
• Wordsearches and games for key words
• Quick quiz about prior learning
• A problem solving idea related to a novel. For example, when studying Lord of the Flies, pupils had to write a paragraph explaining what they would do if they found themselves marooned on a desert island.
• How many symbols can you identify? - From a picture list of 20
• Can you define key vocabulary?

Something I have found recently, with a very difficult class, is that pupils like these activities to be colour-coded. My Year 10s know they have to come in and immediately start completing the pink sheet. Their response has been a real eye-opener, and I will definitely be using more colour-coding in the future.