What is morning meeting? Well, it is a time for students to gather together and start the day in a positive way! This is my first year implementing morning meeting, and I love it. I have always struggled in years past to find time for it, and I am telling you it is definitely worth the time. It takes a little longer than what I want, but I truly love this time we spend each day and the routine we have. We cover so many skills and standards in the 15-20 minutes we spend on morning meeting each day.
You can see my schedule above. I mostly have it posted so that I don't forget any of the steps. (Yes, I am that forgetful!) We start by staying our class mission statement. We wrote this at the beginning of the year, and it is our class promise to do our best each day. You can see them reading the mission below. It's a quick mission that takes us about 1 minute to complete. It's a great reminder to keep us on track during the day.
Then, we gather around the rug and do a little dance and sing! My kids LOVE this. We do the same song for the whole week, so by Friday they really know it. I typically use Dr. Jean songs. My kids love to sing and dance to them. They usually have motions, so that makes it even more fun! The songs help teach us fluency, and they help us get our bodies and brains moving. It is a healthy way to start our school day. Who doesn't love to sing and dance?
After we sing, we sit down and share. I usually have 3-4 students share each day. My goal is to have each student share at least once a week. There are some days a student shares even though he/she has already shared, but he/she is so excited about something that they want to tell the whole class. So, I of course can't say no to that! Sometimes I give them topics to talk about. This teaches us how to stay on topic (good for writing skills), we learn how to tell stories in order (also good for writing!), and we learn to listen/speak in front of others. Do you see all of these standards we are doing?! It is amazing, and most importantly we are coming together as a class and building relationships.
After we share, we gather on our rug spots and practice some phonics skills. We use the Michael Haggerty phonemic awareness book. I read from the book and the students respond. It is a quick practice and fun to complete.
After phonics, we move on to our poem. Here we practice so many skills. We read one poem a week. I use the alphabet poems and each poem has a puppet to go along with it. My kids LOVE making the puppets. Each day we read the poem and practice fluency (we use different voices), finding rhyming words, punctuation, words that start with certain letters, etc. You can read more about my poems here. I refer to our poem and vocabulary portion of our morning meeting as shared reading and writing time.
After we read our poem, we move on to our vocabulary portion. This is also our shared writing time. I introduce 3 new vocabulary words each week and we practice these new words by putting them into sentences. I try to find a picture that would go with the vocabulary words, and then we practice writing sentences using the new words we learn. We reread our story each day. We focus on concepts of print at this time, spacing between words, punctuation, capital letters at the beginning of sentences, and many more skills! You can read more about our shared writing here!
As you can see, I am a firm believer in morning meeting. Everyone does it a little different, but this is the way I enjoy doing it. We have fun each morning and it is a great way to start our day! If you have morning meeting, please share below what you do! I love to hear how each classroom uses it. :]
