Morning Meeting

If you've been around for a while, you've heard me say "Morning Meeting is the most integral part of your day."  It's true.  Morning Meeting sets the tone for the day.  It gives you the opportunity to check in with your students.  It establishes connection and community in your classroom.  It sets the tone for the day by letting students know what they'll be doing.

If you're not familiar (and it's ok if you are not!!) with Morning Meeting, it's a 4-part chunk of the day.  Below I will highlight the parts and give a brief description of each.

Part 1: The Greeting-The greeting is exactly what it says-a greeting.  Students (and teacher!) greet one another by name.  This is a great time to practice social skills like speaking loudly and clearly and eye contact.  

At the start of the year, we do our greetings together, either sitting or standing in a circle.  This allows students to get comfortable greeting their peers.  Kids have to be trained and trusted before they go off on their own!  I use my Morning Meeting Greetings for this.  I pull a card and we will greet one another according to what it says.  As time progresses, students are sent off on their own to greet their friends.  They look at the Morning Greeting Poster each morning so they know what the greeting of the day is.

Part 2: The Message-This is a short note or message written by the teacher to the students.  Students read it with you.  The message is written with the intention of helping students learn about the work they will be doing that day.  Teacher Tip: Review concepts kids are currently learning at the bottom of the message!  You can also have kids search for things in the message...think capital letters, punctuation, trick/sight words, word family words, etc...They love coming up and sharing the pen! 

For most of my career, I hand-wrote the messages.  My kids loved seeing the different colors of markers.  Sometimes I would add little drawings, which they also loved!  However, when the pandemic hit, and we were not allowed to gather at the rug, I was forced to type and project my message.  Turns out this wasn't a bad thing, because typing the message is MUCH faster than writing it.  And let's face it-I am no artist; the clip art images I find are much better!

Part 3: The Share-Students share information about important parts of their lives.  I use my Morning Meeting Sharing Cards to choose topics for whole-group sharing early in the year.  

Sentence sentence stems are highly recommended at the beginning of the year.  The stems help build confidence and take the thinking part of formulating a sentence away.  I like to write (or type!) the stems on the board for students to use.  Example of a sentence stem: "My favorite food is ____."  

Picture banks are helpful for young students as well.  Below is a picture bank of summer activities.  We brainstormed the list ahead of time (hello, vocab lesson!) and then the kids used the following sentence stem: "My favorite part of summer break was _____." 

Part 4: The Group Activity/Game-Students (and teacher!) complete a fun activity or game together.  Everyone participates in this.  This part of the meeting promotes teamwork, social skills and cooperative learning skills.  It can be something as simple as singing a song together, or reading a predictable text together.

I keep my Morning Meeting Games laminated and on a ring as shown below.  Each day, I can flip to a new game.  A highly requested game in recent years is I Have, Who Has.

One of my favorite resources for learning more about Morning Meeting is The Morning Meeting Book.  (affiliate link).  It's a quick read and helped me streamline the meeting in my classroom.

Not sure where to start?  Grab my free Morning Meeting Planning Pages to plan out your first few weeks of the meeting.  It will help keep you focused and give you a plan.

All Morning Meeting resources shown in this post were linked throughout.  However, if you'd like to save a bit of money, you can grab the BUNDLE.  This has been a very popular product in my store over the years!  Thanks for your interest!

xo

Megan