Journaling

I was intrigued after our last class with journaling every day as bell-work. In high school, I never had a consistent type of bell-work presented in any class, and they were only assigned sporadically with no reliable pattern established at any point in the school year. I think that bell-work sets the tone for the class and serves to put the students into an English-centered way of thinking. SO I looked a little deeper into journaling daily for bell-work and I found an awesome resource I would like to share!

On Teachers Pay Teachers, I found a bell-work journal with prompts that last the entire school year. The prompts cover various types of writing including responses in the form of letters, journal entries, poems, bulleted lists, paragraphs, pictures, and social media posts. Sadly, it’s not free… but it is cheap ($16) considering how much you’re getting with the product. The packet is organized by month with twenty-five worksheets per month (275 total)  and is designed to last the entire school year. The template is also editable and provides practice for writing, brainstorming, proofreading, planning/outlining, and gives the students the opportunity to respond to controversial topics. Each worksheet provides a writing prompt, a space for the student’s response, a place for an additional picture if the student wishes to include one, and various other components depending on the type of prompt/style of response.

While I love the idea of free-write time, I think that students will likely need a little more structure, especially if they have never experienced this routine of writing in another class, to perform best during bell-work time. Maybe after the first semester of directed writing time using this resource or a similar one I could transition into free-write once the students are in the habit of coming in each day prepared to write a short response of some type. I think that this would actually work best because students would not only learn the routine, but they would gather ideas about appropriate topics to write about the various formats that they may use to communicate their ideas.

I’m not sure if writing for bell-work would necessarily be the one thing I fight the hardest for… but I definitely think this is an excellent way to get the creative juices flowing and to simply get students interested in writing so that they may perform better on other writing assignments in the class!