Using Paired Passages for Bell Ringers or Exit Slips

I love a good resource that just keeps on giving, and when it comes to paired passages, I feel like I can just keep finding ways to use paired passages over and over.

Whether we are working on speaking and listening skills and doing some Socratic Seminars or working on writing skills that require students to pull information from other resources, paired passages, especially ones that focus on high-interest topics, are worth having on hand.

Previously, we wrote a blog post about 5 New Ways to Use Paired Passages.

In that post, we talk about 5 activities.

• Sentence Slips
• Scavenger Hunts
• Citation Practice
• Facts First
• Research Starters

However, I’m adding yet another activity option to that list.

Today, we’re talking about how paired passages can be used for bell ringers and exit slips.

What are bell ringers?

Bell ringers are activities students do right away at the beginning of class (as the bell rings). These activities typically practice previously learned skills or quickly, formatively assess skills that will soon be introduced.

What are exit slips?

Exit slips are another formative assessment strategy. 

Exit slips are a final task that students are asked to complete before leaving for the day. They can be related to the content that the class has been working on, or they can be a quick assessment or skill check of previously learned skills or standards.

Using Paired Passages for Bell Ringers and Exit Slips

When repurposing paired passages as bell ringers and exit slips, it’s important to remember that the whole passage and all of the questions don’t have to be used every time.

Honestly, we have enough paired passages in The Sparkly Notebook Store for you to use every day for most of the year, but that may not be totally necessary.

Instead, you could use a single paragraph or two and one or two questions for either a bell ringer or an exit slip.

The nice thing about paired passages is that you can pull paired passage topics your students are actually interested in.

We have a whole bunch of paired passages on various high-interest student topics. To see a more detailed breakdown of the available paired passages, check out this blog post!

Paired Passages as Formative Assessments

Since each paired passage includes a variety of questions, not unlike the types of questions asked during state testing, they are a really great way of quickly assessing your students’ skills in a way that you want to become familiar to them.

When using paired passages for bell ringers and exit slips, you can pick and choose the paragraphs and questions that specifically work on the skills you want to assess students on. 

Paired passages are just little gifts that keep on giving, and we want to keep giving you more and more ways to use them.

If you want to take a closer look at the many paired passages in The Sparkly Notebook Store, click here to see the full bundle and take a closer look at all the different topics you can choose to use with your students.

Have a great day!