Students need to be engaged from the first moment they arrive to school. In fact, the first moments of the school day are some of the richest opportunities for learning.
Morning worksheets have been my chosen (or default) method of daily engagement, if I can call the activities engaging. Often the activities are boring and unimaginative. Typical canned morning work books and daily oral language activities are little more than fill in the blank and multiple-choice exercises. These activities seem to shift students’ mental gears from bright eyed and excited to docile and subdued. The worksheets are even worse to grade.
I appreciate a calm, controlled classroom as much as the next teacher, but certainly there’s a better way. I want to engage students in morning work that ramps them up to engaging and creative experiences throughout the rest of the day.
So I want to engage students in listing things every morning. Lots of things. Numerical things and visual things and emotional things, noises and smells, verbs and synonyms, geographic locations and animals that eat plants. The goal of the first lists will be numerical size: how many unique ideas can you generate? Can you think of more ideas today than you did yesterday? Later, lists will focus on generating more complex ideas, like solutions to an open-ended problem, or drawings to illustrate a recent science or mathematical concept.
Interesting bell-ringer activity. I’m pondering incorporating some type of bell work this year so that I’m not wasting the five minutes after class starts. You are right in pointing out that such assignments frequently become busy-work.