Using Bell-Ringers and Warm Ups in Grades 3-5

Kirsten 0:11

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the social studies teacher podcast. So glad you're here tuning in. As always, today, we are going to be talking about how you can use bell ringers and warm ups in grades three through five.

Kirsten 1:04

I truly, truly love this part of the day. Because number one, it was consistent, it was a great way for me to get my head together and get my head in the game before each block. And it was also nice to kind of have something that students knew what to expect. And they're not coming in saying what are we doing today. So this is hopefully going to be a great source of help if you're looking for ideas on just kind of getting some quiet time or some quiet activities where students are still learning or doing something engaging, and academic.

Kirsten 1:41

So just to set the scene, let's picture that your students are filtering into the classroom. They're full of energetic chatter from their transition over the previous block, or even crazier recess. Oh, my goodness, how do you even start by setting the tone and getting them focused for some learning time. And that is where our warmups come in. So in this episode, we're going to talk about what warm ups are, why you should be using warm ups, how to use warm ups at the beginning of the block and just prepping for it. And also some resources if you're looking for warm ups for both social studies, and I have some ELA ones as well.

Kirsten 2:25

So let's start with warm ups. What are they? Warm ups are activities that are independently and quietly done as everyone waits for the class to arrive and settle in. They are short, sweet and are not meant to take longer than 10 minutes to complete. For example, something I did do for my ELA and social studies block were grammar warmups. Grammar is always great, not just in ELA, but also when you're applying it to social studies and writing in social studies as well. So it's a great integration there. And it was very similar to my current daily grammar year round activities that I do have. And they are specifically geared for third, fourth, and fifth grade, we would do a set of questions that are provided for the day and we would check them as a class. So another question you might have is why even use warmups?

Kirsten 3:14

Why are they so great as you say, warm ups are just really a great way to start the day, starting your learning block before diving into the main content. So one thing that it's beneficial for is that it helps you reset from the previous block, they give you some breathing room to prep anything needed before you start your lesson or activity. And once it becomes a habit and routine, there's no more guessing of what are we doing when students are walking in the room.

Kirsten 3:42

So let's talk about the steps to use warm ups at the beginning of a block. So I'm going to share how I did it. The first thing I did, of course, prepping the materials. So students need an individual student warm up folder, labeled and this is something that's distributed at the beginning of the year. So if you're listening into this in real time, save a folder, out of the many folders you might have as a warm up folder, or you can easily purchase at the Dollar Tree or Target or WalMart, some folders that are the same color, maybe just like something completely different from your subject colors that you might have at your school. So like maybe black or we had a red warm up folder. So that's just one idea. And then having warm up activities, either for social studies, or for ELA, which I'll share with you some information about that at the end of this episode. And then of course answer keys. That's always a really great thing to have as well. So how I prepped for the week, what I would do is make copies of the warm ups the week before because you would need them at the start of Monday. So it's just kind of what I did before leaving for the week on Friday. I would make my copies usually on Thursday, Wednesday or Thursday. And one of the things I would make copies for are warmups. I liked having warm ups only Monday through Thursday. And I did not assign any warm ups on Fridays. So it was more like they come in and they do some i time, which they could read, catch up on assignments that they need to turn in by the deadline. They might write a story. So it's very, it's, it's still they're coming in quietly and doing some work. But it's not a structured warmup, make sure the copies that you make for the warm ups are double sided hole punched, or stapled and collated so that they can be easily handed out. Bonus points if you have two days on one page, because all you have is front and back. So you got Monday and Tuesday on one side, Wednesday and Thursday on another side. But if it's not, you can always have it so that you have like Mondays one side, Tuesdays on the back, and then Wednesday, Thursday, and you have that hole punched, double sided stapled students receive their new weekly warmups on the first day. So whatever that might be Monday, or whenever you come back that first day, let's say maybe it's Labor Day week, and you don't have school on Monday, what I would do is I would put an X on the day that we would not be in school before making copies. So I would just put an X on that Monday's warm up or not make a copy of it if it is more than one page. And I would just make copies and they know that okay, like we're coming back on Tuesday, I see Monday's Xed out so and you also don't have to put X on multiple pages, you just do it on the master copies - super easy to do. And they just go on right to say we just skip it and move on. Easy peasy.

Kirsten 6:34

Another point that I want to mention is just during the warmup, so we talked about like prepping it and making copies before you hand it out. After you hand it out. One thing to note is that you want to make sure that the purpose of warm ups is to ease everyone into the learning block. So this time is where they're unpacking getting settled in their seats. And once they're at their desk, they are expected to work independently on their warm ups for about five to 10 minutes actively working on it actively doing the problems. They're doing this independently and quietly. So it is important to emphasize that they are to try their best and answer the questions on their own. So you might have students come up like I don't get this question. And unless like multiple people, you know, like, well, you want to tell them, we're going to be discussing it during the time we chat. So just do the best you can. And we'll talk about it. So if you have multiple people like asking you about that specific question, it is good if you need to be like, Oh, this is a typo, let's do this word instead, you can always do that before you check. But if it's something where it's like a one off where students like I don't get this, it's kind of just the best to let them try their best independently and check on the student maybe during or after getting if they understand that question. So you're going to be checking it as a class as whole group. So that is just one thing to note. Another thing to note is that sometimes students may be tempted to wait until we check answers to fill in their warmup booklet. So they might be looking like they're working on something, but they actually did not fill in anything. And they're just waiting the five to 10 minutes. That is not a surprise, like that's happened your time and time again year after year. But it is important to make sure that just to remind them that they need to be working actively on the warmups. Because what they're doing is it's supporting what they're going to be learning in the content. When students finish early, they can always read a book or they can work on an early finisher activity that you might have established for the class. So that is the during part of the warmup.

Kirsten 8:41

This last or one of the last parts is checking as a class is is always important to do, actively checking with them, going over with them encouraged volunteers to share their answers. And of course, always gently correct them if their answers are not correct. Usually what I had was I had my own warmup copy, I would make an extra copy for me. And I would project it on the screen where everybody could see. And I would write in the answer for students as well. So this helps give them a visual as well as having to listen to answers out loud. So you're seeing it visually you're seeing it you know, they're doing it kinesthetically. And then they're hearing it auditory. So that is always great to check all the boxes as far as the different modalities of what they're learning, but it's just, you know, going after, okay, like number one, like read it out. You show them how it goes like what if you're circling the nouns, you circled all the nouns and what it says rewrite this as a exclamatory sentence and then you would do that. So that is something I encourage you to do actively show them how you're doing it so that they're, even though it's a quick activity, they can still get some something that they can apply to future content that they might be learning in the future or they might have already learned in the past. And that is one thing I do want to mention, there's always a variety of ways you can do warm ups, it can be a spiral review. So maybe they may not know all of it yet all the content, this is really fun, especially like math, they may not know the names of all 3d shapes, or they haven't gotten to fractions yet. But as the year progresses, they're going to see those same concepts over and over. And so they will be more familiar with it. But then there are also warm ups that are paced alongside of what they're actually learning for that specific time of year. So either one is fine. It's just depending on what you want, and which type of warmups you utilize. By the last day of the week, or the last day we do warm ups, which is was usually a Thursday, I had students turn in their warmup booklet, so that they were not accumulating anything, if their warm up folders all year, just imagine like weeks and weeks of warm ups from like, way back when so they would always turn it in. And I would check their warm ups for completion only without giving it a grade, though, sometimes I would give a completion grade. So if they've completed everything, and they look like they've actually done the work, I would give them 100 Or, but most of the time it would be just to check. And of course, when I did this, I would tell students in advance like this week, it's a completion grade. And honestly, it was because I didn't have enough grades in the gradebook. And so I was like, Okay, where can I pull grades. And this would be one of the ways I would get those grades in our school also had school wide home folders or Tuesday folders. And so those weekly warm ups were always sent home that following week along with other papers and announcements.

Once you have your warm up system set up, it really is seamless, and it makes each teaching block start off with an extra bit of calm and and a little bit less chaos. If you are teaching ELA or social studies, I'm going to be sharing with you some ideas of how you can incorporate it and use it. As far as resources, I should say I've already shared the ideas. Now we're talking about the actual resources. So I do have daily grammar resources. It's a spiral review. So there it's kind of building upon itself each time and it's a familiar format. And I have one for third grade for fourth grade and for fifth grade and it's all TEKS aligned. So it's really great because it's also to to a page one of my favorite things about it. It's only four questions. So it really does not take that long. It is formatted for four days a week and can be completed in five to 10 minutes a day. I also have answer keys because you know how it is like, you got to figure it out along with them. But I make it easy with answer key. So that is something that you can check out is my daily grammar, warmups. It's mainly like grammar vocabulary type thing. So it'll have stuff like context clues, suffixes, prefixes, adjectives, prepositions, anything related to grammar and vocabulary, you will see that there. But I also have the daily social studies, comprehension passages, I have a whole bundle of that. And it's great for throughout the year, there's 57 topics 228 passages, you don't have to use all of them. So there is more than enough to use throughout the year. There are also quizzes you can use if you want to do like Monday through Thursday passages and then a weekly quiz related to that topic. That's always a great thing to utilize. And this is also TEKS aligned for social studies. So that's a really great benefit. If you're looking to incorporate some resources for your warm up in ELA and social studies. It's a great way to connect the dots there. All right, well, that is the end of this episode. I will talk to you next week.