“Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.” Rita Pierson says it best with her quote. Relationships are so important in the classroom. But what and how are you supposed to do to grow relationships with 20 + kids?
One of my favorite ways to foster relationships in the classroom is through morning meetings. It is one of my favorite times of the day. We get to have some fun and students learn about each other and not only do I form relationships with the kids, but they form relationships with each other.
Morning meeting consists of 5 parts: greeting, sharing, social skill, game, and morning message.
Greeting
When the kids are gathered around in a circle on the floor, I start with a greeting. I always teach them how to introduce themselves and ask their neighbors for their name and then tell them good morning while giving them a nice handshake. As time moves on, I teach them all sorts of different handshakes, the pinky shake, the butterfly shake, the milk cow, etc.
Sharing
Kids love getting to share ALL the things so they absolutely love share time. I usually have some object, stuffed animal, stick, 3-D wood shape, etc., that the students pass around as they share. What they share varies from day to day. Some days they share about their weekend or what they did last night. Sometimes they have to answer a specific question such as what is your favorite color. There are days where we skip sharing time all together because we are short on time.
Social Skill
I feel like this is where a lot of the magic happens in morning meetings. I always have a portion of morning meeting set aside to talk about stuff that will make the students a better person. This varies from week to week and day to day. Sometimes we talk about school or classroom expectations. Some days we talk about very specific situations that have happened within our class. Other days we are practicing social skills or talking about the 8 Keys of Excellence. This portion of the morning meeting is what helps to grow your class together.
Game
This is the students favorite part of the morning meeting. We don’t play a game every day, but the kids get very excited when there is a game. It brings a bit of fun to start the day. Some of the games we play are educational and some are just pure fun. Games are as simple as passing an object or word around the circle and timing it. Sometimes I pull a game from our math curriculum's daily fluency activities and we do that.
Morning Message
I’ll start off by saying this is my weakest part and I don’t do this every day, every week, or even every month. I will write my students a letter if I have something important for them to know for the day. I almost always write a morning message if I know I’m going to be absent for the day.
I tried really hard to be intentional towards the second half of last year by making sure the morning message was decodable for my students. This was just another opportunity for my students to read meaningful text. I hope in the upcoming school year to be more consistent with doing morning messages.
Heidi said when she taught kindergarten, she would wrote the message with the students. What a great way to bring in some encoding with students and have them help you segment the sounds in the words and then write the letters that match the sound!
Final thoughts
What I love about morning meetings is you get to make it work for you and your classroom. You get to make it what you want and need it to be each day. Some days my morning meetings are quick and other days they take a little bit longer.
~Heidi & Michelle
Resources/References
Rita Pierson TED Talk
The Morning Meeting Book
Comments