Morning Meetings: A Review and Refresh

It’s hard to pick a singular favorite part of our day (there are so many parts I love!) but morning meetings rank in the top five.

I’ve talked about morning meetings over HERE but I wanted to add some fresh ideas for you today.

An important point to note is that we do morning meetings every single day.  This means we have a morning meeting whether it’s a typical day, a field trip day, or even a substitute teacher day.

Morning meeting is our predictable, grounding, and inviting entry into a day of learning.

Morning meetings build our community, foster friendships, and increase inclusivity.

You can get as fancy as you want with these but ours are pretty basic, which make them doable on a daily basis.

Think of this, though, as a recipe.  You can add flavor and spice to meet the needs of your classroom.

First off, our bell rings at 7:57.  Students line up, grab the belongings they need (this is a structure we teach and practice the first two weeks of school), and wait for me to open the door.

I open the door at 8am and greet them.  If there’s anything different they need (or anything they don’t need), I announce it at this time.  Then, they enter the classroom and I stand and say good morning to each child.

Students come in and settle in.  For us, this means grabbing book boxes, and joining on the rug.  They have about 3 minutes to do so and then the morning meeting begins.

One of the biggest management pieces in our classroom boils down to transitions.  They have to be tight and you achieve that through practice, discussion of expectations, and predictable procedures.  For example, if a student has a parent note or something to turn into the office, it gets dropped in a bucket on the side counter, which I labeled as, “Communication Station.”  This means that I’m not dealing with individual concerns or needs because I’m welcoming in each child, by name, at the door.

Once the meeting begins, I greet the class as a whole and we go over the agenda.  I always keep the board labels up and ready and it’s something the students and I reference all throughout the day.  You can grab the labels as a freebie in my resource library.

At this point, you can decide what to cover or what to discuss.  I’ve never used a set structure but if that works for you, try it!

Typically, we go over any big news of the day and then recite our class promise together.  This is something we write together the first week of school and repeat daily.  You can have a student lead this, which they love.  If you’re looking to establish some structure and practices, THIS is a great resource to accomplish that.

I like to pull one of THESE cards, which immediately get students turning and talking.  I only provide 1-2 minutes for this and then we come back as a whole and discuss thoughts.  This is also a great time to discuss what active listening looks like!

Next, we do our book talks, which can be one to two students who signed up for that day.  You can grab our book talk resources HERE or read more HERE.

Some other things that we might do in our morning meeting include:

Power Words: We will pull a card and discuss the definition, prior knowledge, and application in our lives or how we would use it in a sentence.  We create a gesture for it and throughout the day, I’ll call out the word and they’ll repeat and do the gesture.  At the end of the day, the word card goes on our word wall.

Presidential Studies: We set out to learn all the presidents throughout the year.  We go in order but there’s no rule to it.  My class assistant (a student job) will either use THIS or THIS or go online to share some facts.  We typically record on one class anchor chart.  There’s no assessment; we learn for the joy of learning something new and then we tie it into our social studies units.

State Studies: We cover two states each month so if it’s time to learn about a new state, we will use THIS to pull key details.  Students do the bulk of the research independently (they make a map and write about the state) but this is a great way to intro it.

Read aloud: If it’s a Monday, we ALWAYS read the picture book that our mentor sentence comes from (you can read more about that HERE).  If I don’t own the book, I’ll pull it up on YouTube.  We might also do a bit of reading from our class read aloud, which is a novel that I read from and students listen.

Celebrate: If it’s a Monday, I want to hear about their weekend and if it’s Friday, I want to hear what they hope to do over the weekend.  We use a ton of resources from HERE.  We celebrate everything from kindness (we build a kindness wreath), birthdays, accomplishments, or personal victories.  This is a powerful way to build your class community!

Whew!  I hope some of that helped!  All in all, we keep our morning meetings anywhere from 15-18 minutes but sometimes, they’re much shorter or even a tad bit longer.  It really just depends what you want to cover.

If you do morning meetings, I’d love to hear from you in the comments!