Chris Hilgeman

This is a fun warm up activity for a class about Prohibition or the 1920's in the U.S. It includes five entertaining questions that are designed to grab student attention.

Now updated with eight questions! A fun bellringer testing student's abilities as a cook on an Old West cattle drive. Students are asked multiple choice questions about jobs, nicknames, chuck wagon recipes, equipment, etc. to see if they can guess the right answers. This provides an excellent warm-up bellringer for a unit on the Old West, Texas History, the Long Drives, or the Cattle Industry. Since there are eight questions the teacher has the option of using this over the course of one,

Students learn how to communicate in code in the same way that U.S. prisoners of war did during the Vietnam War. The Tap Code is easy to learn and the presentation includes a slide of student handout cheatsheets with the code and basic instructions. The presentation also includes 3 short audio messages using the tap code for students to decipher. This is a fun activity that can be used in conjunction with a Vietnam War unit or just in general (who doesn't like learning secret codes?) It ta

This warm-up activity is a perfect way to start your US History (Prohibition, etc.) or US Literature (Great Gatsby, etc.) unit dealing with the 1920s. Slang from this period of history is used and students have to guess the meanings of these words. A great way to capture student's attention at the beginning of a class or fill in the last ten minutes of class.

A fun bellringer where students learn fun facts about the interesting experiences of pioneer children in the old west. How did children find gold for themselves? What barnyard animal did they practice their lassoing skills on? Use this as a fun way to begin or end a class about the West.

Use this fun bellringer quiz as a warm-up for any unit having to do with Thanksgiving. The quiz challenges student's assumptions about what would have been eaten on the first Thanksgiving between the Pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians. Eel or chicken? Corn on the cob or acorns? Take the quiz and see how well you and your students do!

This is a fun warm-up bellringer that challenges students to guess the meaning of strange-sounding idioms from other countries.

Love, War and Lightning is a Powerpoint Review Game template that can be used as a fun review game for any subject! There are a total of 25 possible slots for you to insert your own subject matter questions. Once a student answers a question correctly they get to see the "prize" which can either be a point gain, loss, or the chance to switch points with another player. The best part is that the game's outcome can change with every turn, up to the very end!

A warm-up bellringer that allows students to play the role of a medieval doctor. The multiple choice question ask about medieval cures to common maladies. This is a fun warm-up activity for any lesson on the Middle Ages. Enjoy!

Here are some of the prompts I use in my own class to start the day. Each takes between 1 - 5 minutes to complete (depending on the time the teacher allows) and is a great way to start class off in an interesting way that engages students and gets their creative juices flowing. Sometimes I have students write their answers while other times we quickly go around the room and hear everyone's answers. I've also uploaded a preview file with 8 of the 30 prompts you are welcome to use for free to se

A great activity for teaching students how to annotate using a fun, kinesthetic approach!

This fun warm-up activity is designed for students who do not know any Kurdish. It is designed to show how critical thinking and pattern recognition can make learning a language much easier than a student would expect. This presentation can be used as a quick warm-up for a wide variety of classrooms, including foreign languages, geography, and social studies. Overall, this activity is less about learning Kurdish and more about showing students how languages have patterns that often can be f

This is a practice Document Based Question (DBQ) exam for students preparing to take the Advanced Placement (AP) World History exam. Includes 8 primary and secondary source documents.