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Harrell on Bell Work
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19 thoughts on “Harrell on Bell Work”
Thanks, I needed that timely support. My principal began requiring me to have what he calls “Do now” activities for every class. I was finding thinking of things every day for 6 periods and 4 levels of Spanish burdensome. I’m getting better at coming up with no-work, non-paper-and-pencil “bell-ringers”. I comply with orders by having a permanent spot in the corner of my whiteboard by the entry door labeled Al entrar (upon entering) and have experimented with “bell ringers” like: Sit quietly and take 10 deep breaths counting to yourself in Spanish., Choose a book from the class library and read quietly. Pick up (the mini-novel we’re reading) and read aloud/translate page x to a partner. Take paper and write three sentences : with word x, or about what you did last night, or something else that can be used to start beginning of class conversation, but that I don’t have to see or collect… I gather paper from the recycling bin in the faculty work room and quarter it with a paper cutter to keep a supply of paper slips.) or just Sit and practice good posture for conversation. As I said, I’m getting better at complying with the “Do now” posting rule, but I could use more ideas.
Huzzah!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I always felt that “Do Nows” were a command to “Die Now”. I’m HORRIBLE with them. Robert’s classes and mine start out exactly the same way! I have also had success (so the required smartboard activity appears daily) with keeping a daily “calendar” on the smartboard that we fill in during the conversations with upcoming field trips, games, matches, theater/band/chorus performances, motocross weekends, opening day of hunting season, World Series games, Buffalo Bills games…whatever peaks their interest. This also helps me to think of where to start on days that my coffee hasn’t kicked in yet.
Either Nathan or Michele offered this gem on their blog: http://www.waveatthebus.blogspot.com
This crazy dad dresses up in costumes every day for nearly two years now to wave goodbye to his teenaged son as his school bus passes the house. It has been a great jumping-off spot for many classes this year!
Beginning class in this way not only creates that environment that we are looking for, but it gives our students a chance, nearly every day, to have an opportunity to use the language in a completely natural way. It isn’t always easy. Somedays they just want to respond in English. :o) But using all of the techniques and strategies we incorporate in storyasking and storytelling, it isn’t stressful and they do really enjoy their time in the spotlight.
Thanks again Robert!
with love,
Laurie
I’ve had good results with starting with songs. They make for a soft transition into the language, and bring us all together. I would love to be doing the conversation at the beginning, and as the new owner of an aged Smartboard, I would love to know how to do that calendar work. (I have a workshop this weekend, but if there’s something I can adapt to Russian, that would be great.)
Nuts and bolts question: Robert, when you’re asking those questions, do you ask them in order of every kid? Is that how they’ve learned them “in order”? Or do you ask them of one kid after another? Of the whole class? Like Catharina’s class, my “cubs” might all want to answer at once if I asked them questions like this every day. We do PQA, but I usually focus on one kid at a time to ask.
(It feels as though I’m asking too basic a question here, Robert. I would think I could envision this better.)
Michele,
I zoom in and out. The initial question is always a whole-class question. From there I pick someone to concentrate on for that question that day. Usually it’s a different student for each category. On game days I will ask a team member about the game after asking the class what day it is. After asking the class “Wie geht’s?” (How’s it going?), I will ask one or two students why things are good or bad or they’re tired. (I have one student who usually says he’s tired on days when he got a good night’s sleep, so we have decided that sleeping makes him tired. Also, many students – especially in the lower levels – simply give a thumbs up (good), thumbs down (bad) or hand wag (s0-s0) to indicate how they are feeling.)
Hope this helps make the process clearer.
I start each class with a warm-up – three questions or sentences that recycle the previous day’s vocabulary. I have students copy them into a neat little form (which I stole and manipulated from another teacher of course!), and then they write a response to the questions and a translation for the sentences. It takes about 5mins for the students to complete and I like it because it also gives me a good sense for how well they know the structures. Then I can PQA for a little bit to review before moving on to whatever I have planned for the day. For me, as a first-year teacher and TPRSer last year, this was the structure that I needed and I’m still holding on to it now mostly because it serves as a comprehension check as well as an opportunity for re-circling.
I do have misgivings about how to include this into the gradebook though too, and I fudge it at times as needed.
I’m required to do a bell-ringer as well. I’ve been giving 10 questions quizzes of the previous days structure (multiple choice vocabulary). I really love the ideas presented here. I used the who was absent today for the fist time and the class decided the girl was burned by a dragon. What a great story starter! Thanks for all the ideas.
Thank you for sharing so many great ideas! I implemented one just yesterday that I did again today and really am having a good time with it. It involves meeting the (Spanish 1) students at the door and asking them all a basic question, such as: How old are you? I hold up a mini-whiteboard with the “sentence starter” ie. Tengo…and then each one responds with an answer. If it is not formed correctly the student stands to the side of the door and listens to the other students. They enter as soon as they respond correctly and I learn more and more about my students. We practiced numbers and structure.
Yesterday I asked them a variety of questions that related to the color of their clothing, matching nouns with adjectives and plurals, etc. Each student was spoken to individually and everyone listened to see who gets it! I grade it by entering 5 points for everyone who is in class since they couldn’t get in until they said the “password” phrase correctly. No paper, no writing, no worries!
I’ve tried different kinds of bell work over the years, but for the past few years have let the first 3-4 minutes of class time be free-reading time. As soon as students come into the class, they choose a book or magazine from my mini-library and read silently until I tell the class to put the books away. This is when I take attendance, pass back papers, address individual issues, etc. (Then I discuss the day/date/weather thing, then the lesson.) I can’t force them to read, and I know that there are resisters who just look at the pictures, but I think they all subconsciously get something out of doing this despite themselves – be it vocabulary, sentence structure, cultural insights… Is this valuable input for them, or am I just artificially justifying something that makes my day easier?
Pesonally I think it’s the best idea yet, Kelly. I would stretch it out more than those few minutes even. We in DPS are firmly convinced that reading is the key to all of it, yet we never get to it, or rarely, because we’re so busy spinning yarns with the kids. Here, if you could get them to stretch that FVR out to ten minutes a day, not only does it give you all that time to take a breather from the last class and call roll, but it also gives the kids what we know to be what is best for them.
Ben, I’m a new TPRS-er here… trying to read as much as possible before the first 6 weeks so I can be very clear in my own mind what structures I want to implement and practice over and over. I teach FLES (prek-5) and only have 40 minutes twice a week. I’m planning to meet kids at the door w/a password. In the past students have had to write the date and weather first thing but I’m rethinking that. I love the reading idea but thinking when I only have 40 min and these kids will take 5 minutes to pick a book, it’s probably not practical. Can you suggest bell work for me?
Thanks. This site is amazing.
Hi Mindee. If you’re able to get your kids that come in only 2x a week settled within the first couple of minutes, you’re extraordinary. I don’t know how you elementary teachers do it!
I would imagine you would want those first 5-10 minutes of class for your own peace of mind, even if some kids are spending 5 minutes choosing a book. If they only read for 5 minutes, great! Problem is, any book you might purchase would be too much of a challenge for them, right? If they are beginning students? They’ll only be able to read narratives that come from the previous day’s conversation or story, right?
Many days what happens for me is 1) the bell rings, 2) I close the door, 3) I gradually walk to the front of the room checking in with any student(s) I feel needs a little checking in with, 4) I get to the front of the room and I start class. (I saw a wonderful video of Grant Boulanger singing a song as he was preparing to start class, an interactive song with his students chiming in, one that they seemed to know well. By the end of the song Grant got to the front of the room and the class was settled in their seats. Those were 8th graders.)
Because I have lots of picture books.. on soccer, dogs and cats, cartoons, I think even if they didn’t do any text reading they would certainly still pick up a word or two that went with the picture.. It’s really a question of if I want to use what ultimately will be 10 minutes to transition in… When you have have 40 minutes (35 really bec of clean up and transition out), it’s an important decision how to use it. Songs are a pretty good idea though.. I will check out Grant’s video.. Do you remember the name of the song? Thanks Sean.
This is an excessively long comment Mindee bc I lifted it right out of the Big CI Book. But it offers a few ideas for starting class. I used to do word associations off a word wall for years, but lately have gone to those precious ten minutes of FVR of the novels which I understand you can’t do right now with those beginners. Given the situation, one of the three ideas listed below from that book might work. Just floating ideas here since there is no one way to do this work. I personally wouldn’t do the singing because I don’t like to force myself into a mood that I am not in with the kids – they see through it:
Strategy #1 – Word Associations:
Making associations with words by working with word walls is a powerful way to help beginning students dive into a foreign language. It also gives both teacher and students confidence, which is what both need most as they start their new year together.
The word wall I use is a mix of verbs and other parts of speech, anything I can use to create language with my students. The word wall helps me and my students interact at this crucial time of year in the simplest and most human way possible; its purpose is not to teach certain words in a certain order but to give us a format to interact in the target language using a little English before that option disappears later.
Some teachers, who are locked into a pacing guide with vocabulary lists that are connected to thematic units, put those words up. But those words, because they are grouped thematically, don’t carry much interest. The only benefit I can see from a student memorizing a list of the colors out of context is that when they go to the country they may be able to recite them to people who already know what they mean.
On that topic, Dr. Stephen Krashen has said:
“How’s this? Don’t worry about number of repetitions. Don’t worry about vocabulary. Worry only about presenting comprehensible and compelling input. The vocabulary will take care of itself. For crucial vocabulary, there will be plenty of repetitions, and they will be “distributed,” not “massed,” exactly the optimal way of presenting items for optimal retention.
“Study ten TPRS classes – none of them with a specific focus on vocabulary. Give students a vocabulary test at the end of the semester or year. See what words they know. Compare this to lists of words that are on typical curricula. Compare to performance of students in classes that focus on vocabulary. That’s it.
“In general, CI-based approaches (including sustained silent reading) produce superior results on VOCABULARY acquisition (as well as reading comprehension, heavily based on vocabulary knowledge) than skill-based approaches.
“Will this be proof? No, no study ever provides proof. Research can only support or fail to support hypotheses.”
The real purpose of the strategies described in this book is to foster communication and shoulder-to-shoulder work between the student and the teacher toward the common goal of sharing language with extremely limited use of English in our classrooms. When that happens, learning will occur in a more powerful and natural way than when big lists of similar words drive the curriculum.
Here is an interesting mix of words that I use as a word wall for word association work all year in level 1. I find that it carries energy and makes for good classes. I know that my own students have enjoyed working with this list over the years because I have enjoyed teaching them to my students over the years.
Spanish Word Wall
levántate
siéntate
rápido
despácio
camina
salta
parate
da una vuelta
adelante
atrás
levanta
baja
mano
pierna
grita
suave
fuerte
toca
señala
pega
cabeza
boca
ojos
mesa
nariz
chico
muchacho
chica
muchacha
silla
piso
techo
puerta
ventana
come
pescado
llora
ríe
escribe
dibuja
oreja
rodilla
carro
tira la pelota
corta
le da, dale
a la derecha
a la izquierda
pelo
pecho
pie
reloj
toma
casa
brazo
lápiz
pluma
grande
pequeño
pone
hermosa
sonríe
una vez
me gusta
French Word Wall
on se lève
on s’assied
rapidement
lentement
marche
saute
arrête
on se tourne
devant
derrière
lève
baisse
main
jambe
crie
doucement
fort
touche
montre (v.)
frappe
tête
bouche
les yeux
table
nez
garçon
fille
chaise
plafond
plancher
porte
fenêtre
mange
poisson
pleure
rit
écrit
dessine
oreille
genou
voiture
lance
coupe
lui donne
English Word Wall
stand up
sit down
rapidement
lentement
marche
saute
stop
turn around
in front of
behind
raise
lower
hand
leg
yells
quietly
loudly
touches
shows
hits, knocks
head
mouth
eyes
table
nose
boy
girl
chair
ceiling
floor
door
window
eats
fish
cries
laughs
writes
draws
ear
knee
car
throws
cuts
gives to him/to her
Here is the process I use in my own CI classroom. Basically it’s just TPR. I go over a few words to start level one classes in the beginning of the year. This simple training wheel exercise starts class on a fun, physical note. We put the words into our physical bodies via gestures, sounds or images that enable us to remember the meaning of the word. We play with the words and make weird sounds and gesture them and just have fun. It’s just establishing meaning, but we make it fun.
If the first word for that class is voiture (car, pronounced vwature in French), first, as always in this way of teaching, I establish meaning by saying to the class that voiture means car. Then I ask if anyone can think of some way to remember that voiture means car. I allow the word association suggestions from the students in English, but only in this beginning of the year activity.
Different suggestions come up. Some are very outlandish but are often the most remembered ones. If you ever doubt your students’ creativity, you won’t after using this strategy word association strategy with them. Someone may suggest that we can remember that voiture means car by making an association with the phrase, “What year (sounds like voiture) is your Toyota?”
Another example, mentioned in the previous chapter, is les yeux in French. The students almost always associate that sound with either laser eye surgery or lazy eye.
If we are working with a verb, of course, we use basic TPR. We put the verb “into our bodies” and then try throughout the year to gesture it whenever we say it, keeping in mind that thousands of repetitions and gestures of a verb is still often not enough.
I once asked a student who scored a perfect score on the National French Exam one year what part of the instruction he felt most contributed to his score, and he immediately replied, “…those word activities we did at the beginning of the year…”
Anyone who has done this kind of gesturing and association knows how oddly powerful and compelling it is as a teaching tool. A few details:
1. If no one can come up with an association, we just go on to the next word.
2. We never do more than three words in one class period, usually only two, and end after five minutes.
3. The process has a predictable sequence each day. First I tell the students what the word means, and then I ask them how they can remember what it means. Doing this creates a pleasant sharing of ideas in English as we get to know each other in the first weeks of the year before we go to all-L2 classes.
Let’s take a closer look at the word association sequence. As stated, each time we introduce a new word from the word wall, we say what it means (there is no need to write it on the board) and then we ask the class how we can remember what it means, as in:
Class, the next word that we want to learn today from the wall is les yeux. Les yeux means eyes. How can we remember what les yeux means?
When the class as a group chooses to remember that les yeux means eyes by making associations in their own minds and by expressing those associations out loud in the group in their own voices, they create a problem solving community.
When a student makes his suggestion, the instructor says:
Oh, class, Bryan said that we can remember that les yeux means eyes because of lazy eye!
By reacting in this way, she acknowledges Bryan and his immediate contribution to the group at the beginning of the class. The student is more important than the subject matter. This is part of the all-important process of personalizing the classroom every day by recognizing the child as a human being first before trying to teach him anything. Bryan is acknowledged for his intelligent and creative suggestion, expressed in his own voice, in linking les yeux to lazy eye.
Also, as soon as I accept Brian’s suggestion, I tell the class in L2 to applaud him. How many times would we ourselves have liked to come into class and receive a round of applause for something we thought of in the first week of school?
The teacher, like Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol, sends this message to her class when starting class:
I’m going to like this class! I like the ideas these kids are giving me!
All the ideas can’t be accepted, of course, so we reject some of the ideas, but always with lots of good will, a smile, and sometimes even that process of rejecting ideas can become pretty funny.
Starting a class with plenty of personal acknowledgement of how smart and creative kids are is good politics. Asking kids for help is always a good idea – it gets them involved. That is why the Jobs for Kids piece mentioned elsewhere in this book has such enormous power. When we say how funny their ideas are, we flatter them. Flattery gets us everywhere in comprehension based instruction.
The phrase “how can we remember” is of key importance when we work with our word walls. How can we remember it? We are becoming a team working together. Here we are all together, about to embark, after this brief period of word association work, into L2 for the rest of the class period, and the inquisitive messages from the instructor are:
How can we all work together?
What can I learn from you?
How smart you kids are!
Man, I could never have thought of that!
and the kids’ messages to the class and to the instructor are:
Look how smart we are!
You can learn from me!
I’m smart!
I can think of weird and crazy things to help the class!
There is a tonal difference here. This inclusion of the individual in the group, this attention to how they can help the larger group, this attention to the student as a person changes many of our students’ perceptions of what our classes are all about.
Of course, if we can remember to do it, we glance briefly with a knowing smile at the student who came up with the gesture or the word association each time it occurs in class. A further bond is built with that student when we remember to do that.
The revolutionary nature of this work CI can be seen in the Word Association activity, which is about forging bonds primarily. Before trying to connect with our kids in the language, we first connect with our students in a social way before we get into the harder challenges of connecting solely in the language after the first few weeks of the year,
One of Three Ways to Start a CI Class
When the fun of working with the word associations begins to wane after a few weeks, the instructor has the option of starting classes using two other strategies – silent reading in conjunction with calming music, or Power Point based Do Now activities. Both are explained later in this book. They cannot be done at the beginning of the year because, unlike the word associations, they assume prior knowledge.
Word Walls Help with Simon Says
When we play Simon Says it is easiest for the teacher to create commands when looking at a word wall. If the words “hit” and “arm” catch the attention of the teacher as she tries to make up commands, she can then say, “Hit your left arm”. She can then ask the kids, as they try to decipher the message, to look at the word wall and maybe help things along with the laser pointer. It’s all about comprehension.
Ben, this is incredibly helpful. Thank you so much. The funny this is.. I’ve done this before but I thought I was cheating. I knew I was teaching to the test (Arlington, Virginia – SMART Goals) and I had to reach all of my students so I went against everything I always learned in school and Spoke ENGLISH. I was terrified my supervisor would walk in and hear me speaking English but I remember the kids loved it and they remembered the words. It’s so great now to be understanding this CI approach! A few quick questions: 1. word wall, only in Spanish or with Translation?
2. Native Speakers – isn’t this boring for them? or is their job to help make the connection enough?
3. Would you ever start with a story the first day? Or would you just do circling w/como te llamas/ como estas, etc
and 4. I teach prek to 5th. I’m assuming I could do this with 2nd and up but younger???
Mil Gracias – Mindee
And by the way, this one answer from you is worth the 4.95/month!!!
1. no translation
2. native speakers have roles to play in class. They write since that’s what they need to do. Also yes – they are to contribute or be graded down on dGR.
3. never teach greetings on the first day. read this article:
4. ask Alisa or Catharina that one.
Excellent. I love getting direct answers. On never teach greetings first day, the article you suggested I read didn’t appear. Can you resend. THX
Mindee I’ll respond to you on the Forum where I saw your question about preK.
If you search under Elementary TPRS (Forum) you might find what you are looking for. Some of us have tried to share what we do with Little Kids: what has worked, or not…, brain breaks, micro mini stories, classroom management, personalization, activities, TPR, songs. etc
I mainly focus on aural input since my students are for the most part preliterate and don’t use FVR, word walls, or free writes.
If you search under Resources at the very top of this page, and hit “videos” you can watch Leslie Davison, Alisa Shapiro-Rosenberg, Diane N, Eric Herman to name a few who are highly experienced teaching FLES.
I would be very happy to help you, and will continue the conversation on the Forum.
Here is that text Mindee:
Skill #27 – Teaching Greetings:
There is a danger in teaching greetings without visual reference. There are too many of them. Moreover, the expressions in French:
How are you?
What is your name?
can sound very much alike:
Comment allez-vous?
Comment vas-tu?
Comment vous appelez-vous?
Comment t’appelles-tu?
Not only that, there are many different ways to ask how a person is:
Ça va?
Comment ça va?
Vous allez bien?
Comment vous portez-vous?
etc.
Now, the brain has to handle each of these arrangements differently, because each sound pattern is different. It is bewildering for kids who have never formerly studied a language before.
Yet, since we are usually under district pressure to “teach greetings” in the first few weeks of school (the district and the book publishers think that asking how one is or what one’s name is or what time it is or what the weather is are easy tasks), we drown our kids in these complex sound patterns and undermine the trust that we are otherwise so carefully trying to build with our students.
Usually what happens is that the teacher walks around the room with a fake smile and fake interest (do they really care how the kid is?) saying the “How are you” question over and over, and very soon the kids’ eyes start to glaze over and with good reason. How would you like to be sitting in a room where someone keeps asking people how they are for five or ten minutes?
Some teachers even sneak in things like “What is your name” (which sounds a lot like “How are you” in French) and then, when the kid innocently answers that they feel good today, the teacher says in English, “Ha ha! I tricked you! I asked you your name, not how you are!” which begins a tirade of using L1.5 to explain the difference and the kids just scrunch down in their seats in an effort to get away from this over-explainer who asks boring questions.
So we need to till the greetings soil with absolute simplicity, so that our students really get it. We can teach greetings slowly over the course of the entire year, a little bit at a time. Delivering easy to understand and interesting and meaningful comprehensible input from the beginning, clearly enforcing rules, going slowly, talking only about the kids, these things will have the kids leaning forward in their seats trying to understand what is going on. But how can we do this with greetings?
There is only one way to teach greetings that I have seen that works: We make their answer visible. Then it works. We write out a list of possible responses to the “How are you?” question of how the students are that day. A good place to put them is on a large poster on a tripod or in a Power Point presentation and we start class with this strategy two or three times a week at least!
Here are the expressions I use:
Ça va/ Ça ne va pas – Good/Not good
comme çi comme ça – so-so
Je vais bien – I’m well
J’ai confiance en moi – I’m confident about myself
J’ai soif – I’m thirsty
J’ai faim – I’m hungry
J’ai sommeil – I’m sleepy
J’ai mal – I am sore, I hurt
Je me sens/Je suis… I feel/I am…
content – happy
heureux – happy
excité – excited
amoureux – in love
en forme – in shape, feeling good
fier/ fière – proud
soulagé – relieved
grincheux – grumpy
irrité – upset
stressé – stressed
triste – sad
fâché – angry
inquiet – worried
frustré – frustrated
nerveux – nervous
déçu – disappointed
vaseux – out of it
malade – ill, sick
confus – confused
épuisé – exhausted
We go around the room getting reps on these structures. We do not allow students to repeat answers. It’s fun to go around the room at the start of a class and ask how each kid is actually feeling that day. The students, since they are not stupid, will be able to tell if we really want to know and that will prompt them to choose honest answers from the list above.
As long as we don’t pry into their personal lives, we can stretch out the conversation by asking why a student is happy or grumpy. This is true even in a first year class. For example, if a kid says she is grumpy we can ask why and she can just say one word, like “un professeur” or a boy could say he is happy because of “une fille”. It’s just a fun way to start the class.
I leave words like “depressed” out of the list of choices I offer my students.
If a child uses an answer that another child has already used during this time spent working on greetings, we use the following expression to swat away their repeated answer:
Déjà pris! – Already taken!
(credit: Sabrina Janczak)