Thanks to Brian Hannon for creating these lessons and sharing with our community! If this is the first time seeing his site, I’d encourage you to also spend time checking out the poetry lessons and novel pairings. These resources are AMAZING!
We hope you all have had a relaxing and restful summer! We’ve noticed an uptick in requests or questions about daily bellringers, so this summer we created over 100 targeted, focused bellringers that you can use throughout the year, wherever and whenever they fit best into your curriculum! All of the bellringers are focused on *mostly contemporary texts from a wide range of authors and poets and are designed to independently guide students through the text with leading prompts and questions. Also, the bellringers were designed so that students could walk into the classroom, look at the board, and start working independently, so everything is housed all on one slide. All of these resources can be found at lmscurriculum.com.
The bellringers each come with six questions: 3 that are analytical and 3 that are creative, all of which were designed to help your students arrive at a stronger understanding of each of the poems. We’re aware that everybody’s bellringers vary slightly from one another, so feel free to add, eliminate, or choose which questions you want your students to focus on. Personally, in my classroom, I’d only have the students complete 1 or 2 of the questions for time’s sake (probably 10-ish minutes), but again, feel free to use the bellringers as you see fit! I’m sure you can stretch the bellringers out into full lessons if you want your students to complete all of the questions.
Also, we created at least 10 bellringers for each of the major “devices” or “focuses” we have in our database: diction, selection of detail, imagery, figurative language, sound devices, structure, line breaks, syntax, rhyme scheme, tone, and “various.” If you use the filters on the right-hand side of the page under “Lesson Focus,” you can filter the bellringers by a specific area you’d like your students to target. For example, if I wanted my students to have a quick bellringer to focus on the function of a poem’s rhyme scheme, I would simply click on the “rhyme scheme” button on the right side under “Lesson Focus.” As mentioned above, we also have a “various” filter, which consists of bellringers that provide a wider range of questions rather than a more singular focus, if you want your students to look at the poem a bit more holistically.
In addition to filtering the bellringers by the specific target area/lesson, we also tagged all of the bellringers by the poets’ names, the poems’ general content/ideas, and the literary devices that are prominent in the text. So if you are less concerned with the specific design of the lesson/poem and want a bellringer about a poem by Ross Gay, for example, you can just click on his name; if you want your students to explore a poem that touches on the concepts/themes of immigration, you can click on the “Immigration” filter under “themes”; if you simply want a poem that contains, imagery and figurative language, you can use the “Literary Tags” filter to help you sort poems that utilize those devices somewhat prominently in the poem.
Brian Hannon is the Director of Secondary Curriculum for LMSvoice. He currently teaches AP Literature , AP Language , and English 10 in Alexandria, Virginia. Brian was the co-founder of the poetryN.O.W., and through his involvement with this organization, Brian went on to found the two largest youth poetry events in his area, the Hyper Bole and Louder than a Bomb. When poetryN.O.W. was absorbed by Split This Rock, a non-profit organization in Washington D.C. that meets at the intersection of poetry and social justice, Brian served as their Youth and Education Development Fellow.
