I teach PK-8. Our school mandates teachers to begin each class with at least 5 minutes of quiet.

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They have suggested to me that I play music and let students "draw how the music makes them feel" for 5 minutes. I've tried for weeks, this doesn't work for so many reasons.

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I have tried giving them a packet of quick drawing-based bellringers, one page with a different prompt for each day. Students would do every page in the packet within 3 minutes and then talk to each other, leaving them nothing to do for the rest of the days. Many of the students are so far behind that they don't know how to read, which led to plenty of "what are we doing???".

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I've tried calm classroom exercises. Many students completely disregard the exercises completely and ruin it for everyone.

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Please, I'm running out of ideas and steam. Any help would be appreciated.