Enlightenment Philosophers - Fun Warm Ups / Bell Ringers / Kick Offs

Are you looking for a way to start class that engages students, builds community, reviews content, and prepares your students for your awesome lessons? If you teach Modern European History or World History, this resource will be most useful during units covering the Enlightenment period; American, French, and Haitian Revolutions; and the Latin American Wars of Independence. It will also come in handy before cumulative assessments during midterms and finals.

In this resource, you will find 80 powerpoint slides that each contain a question and sentence frame for student responses. These questions are presented here as warm ups (aka bell ringers or kick offs) but can also be used as exit tickets (aka learning logs). You may also choose to convert the questions into prompts for early finishers to engage with or for structured student talk activities (Four Corners, Lines of Communication, Clock Appointments, etc). They are thought-provoking and open-ended enough that you could devote anywhere from a couple of minutes to an entire lesson to answering them.

The questions in this resource are about five European philosophers from the Enlightenment period:

Thomas Hobbes
Mary Wollstonecraft
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
John Locke
Charles Montesquieu
They do not need to be presented sequentially - you can pick and choose the ones you like most and present them in whatever order you believe best serves your class. You can also easily substitute the names of these five philosophers with the names of other philosophers you are covering.

Number of slides: 92 total (80 have questions)

The collection of 80 total warm ups is split into the following six sections:

Thomas Hobbes (15 warm ups)
Mary Wollstonecraft (15 warm ups)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (15 warm ups)
John Locke (15 warm ups)
Charles Montesquieu (15 warm ups)
All Together Now (5 warm ups)
Grade levels: 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th

Topic: Enlightenment philosophy

How long it takes: Use this resource during the first couple of minutes of class; or use the questions in this resource as exit tickets, structured student talk activities, and/or tasks for early finishers.

Required materials: none