Bell ringers fall apart fast when kids answer on whatever scrap of paper they can find. By Wednesday half of it’s in the trash can and the other half is folded into a football. A bell ringer sheet fixes that. Every answer goes in one place, and at the end of the week you’ve got something you can actually look at.

Below are two free printable bell ringer templates. No email, no sign-up. Just download and print.

Download the free bell ringer sheets

  • Weekly Bell Ringer Sheet (PDF): one page, one box for each day Monday through Friday, with a spot for the date. This is the classic. One sheet per kid per week.
  • Daily Bell Ringer Response Sheet (PDF): one page with five boxes: ELA, math, science, social studies, and current events. It matches the daily sets we post on this site, so it works great if you assign more than one section or run a homeroom or advisory period.

Both are standard 8.5 × 11 letter size and print fine in black and white.

Weekly sheet or journal?

There are two ways teachers usually do this, and both work. Here’s the honest breakdown:

  • Weekly bell ringer sheet. Easy to collect, easy to check, easy to grade. You hand out a new one every Monday and take it up Friday. The downside: you print a lot of paper, and kids lose them midweek.
  • Bell ringer journal. A composition notebook or a section of their binder that stays in the room. Nothing gets lost, and kids can flip back and see how far they’ve come. The downside: checking 30 notebooks is heavier than checking 30 sheets.

If you’re not sure, start with the weekly sheet. It’s easier to switch to a journal later than the other way around.

How to set up a bell ringer journal

  1. Pick a notebook that stays in the room. A crate or shelf by the door, one per class period. If it goes home, it doesn’t come back.
  2. Same format every day. Date at the top, then the prompt (copied or summarized), then the answer. Tape a printed example inside the cover.
  3. Number the entries. “Bell Ringer #14” makes it easy to say “turn back to #9.”
  4. Leave the first page for a table of contents. Kids think it’s busywork until test review, when they can find every prompt from the unit in ten seconds.
  5. Check them on a schedule. Once a week, or a different class period each day. Skim, don’t grade every word.

How to grade bell ringer sheets fast

Bell ringers are practice, not a test. Grade them like practice:

  • Completion, not correctness. Five boxes done, full credit. Blank boxes lose points. This keeps kids taking risks instead of copying.
  • Spot-check one day. Pick one day’s box and read that one closely. Kids don’t know which day you’ll pick, so they do them all.
  • Stamp or initial while you walk. Walk the room during the bell ringer and initial the box. Friday grading becomes counting initials.
  • Use it as a formative check. If half the class missed Tuesday’s question, that’s tomorrow’s reteach. That’s the real value.

What goes on the sheet?

Anything that takes three to five minutes. If you need ideas, we’ve got big lists ready to go:

Or skip the planning completely. Every school day we post a new set for grades 6–8 and grades 9–12, before 2 a.m. Central. Put it on the board, hand out the sheet, done. Free, no sign-up.

New to bell ringers? Start here: what a bell ringer is and how to run one.

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