Set aside a place on the whiteboard for the bell ringer question to be placed everyday. If you have an interactive board, use the same style template for each day's bell ringer question. The familiarity of the placement and the uniform template will ensure students' ability to fulfill and remember the routine of the bell ringer activity.
Post a question to review yesterday's lesson objectives on the board. The question can be from any subject which you hope to get an assessment of your students' understanding. The students write the question along with their answer to the bell ringer question in their daily journal notebook. The questions should be posed around Bloom's Taxonomy: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Try to use higher-order questions, application, synthesis and evaluation questions, they require more brain power to answer.
Collect the daily journal notebooks for assessment once a week. Each journal entry can be graded quickly with the spool technique. The spool technique gives you an easy way to assess each entry, without spending too much time on each student's writing. For the spool technique, grade the introduction paragraph, the body paragraphs and the conclusion paragraph. Each paragraph is worth one point.