My favorite part of the morning was always our morning meeting! This was where I really got to know my students and everyone had a voice in my classroom. It always started my day off on a positive note and I know my students loved it too. If you are thinking about setting up a morning meeting in your classroom, you're in the right place! I will walk you step-by-step through the four main parts of my morning meeting routine and how you can tweak it to fit the needs of your classroom.
What is a Morning Meeting?
A morning meeting typically lasts anywhere from 10-20 minutes and takes place first thing in the morning. It's a short morning routine consisting of four parts- greeting, sharing, message, and activity. I first learned about this idea from the book, The Morning Meeting Book by Roxann Kriete. After reading more about a responsive classroom and how it can help build a strong community with your students, I decided I wanted to implement it myself too.
How do you introduce the Morning Meeting routine?
I suggest starting your morning meeting on the first day of school! The sooner you start, the easier and quicker it will become part of your day. Just like anything else in your classroom, you will need to teach the procedures and routines for your morning meeting explicitly and review them often.
There are four main parts to a Responsive Classroom Morning Meeting- Greeting, Sharing, Message, and Activity, but I tweaked them a bit to make it work for my classroom. Here are the parts of my morning meeting routine in my Kindergarten classroom.
Part 1: Greeting
In the first part of the morning meeting, we take a minute to greet each other. At the beginning of the year, this takes a LOT of modeling and practice, but by a month in, they've got it down. Since we are sitting in a circle, I would start by turning to the right of me and modeling how to greet the student sitting next to me. I would say, “Good morning (name)” and either shake their hand, give a high five, fist bump, or just a wave. Then, they would say, “Good morning, (teacher name)” and turn to the right of them to the next student and this would continue on around the circle. It helped my students learn each other's names quickly, and also practiced proper greetings and making eye contact with each other while talking.
Part 2: Question of the Day
The next part of the morning meeting was our sharing time. There are plenty of ways you can do this, but the key for my students was for it to be quick and that everyone got a chance to share. I stressed that they only could share one-sentence answers, instead of a long story that dragged on. Also, to help eliminate disruptions, I passed around a special wand and only the student who was holding onto the wand was able to speak. I emphasized that if there was something they wanted to talk about with a student, they could always talk more during lunch or recess.
On Mondays, this sharing time would be asking them what they did over the weekend or what they were looking forward to this week. For the rest of the week, I used daily questions, like “What is your favorite ice cream flavor?”. To help think of questions, I loved using this Reflection Prompt resource from The Primary Brain. It helped to have ready-to-go meaningful questions for each month!
If you are short on time, then I suggest using “this or that” style questions. For example, you would ask “Which pet would you rather have- a dog or cat?” Then, students would have to answer quickly either “dog” or “cat”.
Part 3: Today's Schedule
During this time, I would go through our schedule and share whatever special we were going to that day. I used some visual daily schedule cards and pointed to each one to go over our day. This helped eliminate questions throughout the day of “What time is lunch?” or “Do we have PE today?” because we already talked about it. I just quickly pointed to each picture and said each part of the day. This shouldn't take more than a minute to go through!
Part 4 and/or 5: Morning Message and/or Activity
In the typical Responsive Classroom Morning Meeting, this part is actually two separate parts. However, I was short on time and so I would pick one or the other to do each day. Sometimes we would have time for both an activity and a morning message, so I did both. But having the ability to do one or the other helped me out timewise.
A morning message is a simple sentence that we practice reading every day. First I put, “Today is ___” with the full date at the top. Later in the year, I would leave it blank and have a student come up and fill the date out. Then I used one of these ideas to finish out the message:
- Use it to announce something important
- Practice name writing: have each student come up and sign their name
- Write a simple sentence to work on a specific phonics skill or high-frequency word
- Fill in the blank sentence
- Write a list of words and have kids come up with rhyming pair for each
- Write out a math word problem and have kids solve it
- Tell students a book they are going to read or something they will learn that day
For the activity, it was usually a fun icebreaker-type of activity. In the book, The Morning Meeting, the author shares a bunch of fun activities you can do with your students. Sometimes, we would do a GoNoodle brain break or this Hello Friends Song from YouTube. I liked using different Kagan strategies to maybe practice a phonics skill or sight words with my students, or even just a fun game of freeze dance! Here are some more ideas that I loved from Susan Jones Teaching!
Those are just a few ideas for writing a morning message or doing an activity! You can use that time to find something that your students love and works for your classroom
Class Check-in or Class Meeting
Another option for Morning Meeting time is to use it to hold a class meeting whenever we needed it. Usually, if my students were having a hard time listening during specials or being kind to each other, I would have a discussion with them. It was like our “Come to Jesus moment” for the classroom. I would talk about what I saw and have my students come up with a plan to fix the problem. This really helped build a community of respect and trust because we came up with a solution together.
Things to think about when setting up your morning meeting routine
Now that you understand what a morning meeting is and how it works, you can adjust it to fit the needs of your students. Here are a few questions to ask yourself when deciding how it will work for you.
Where will it take place?
Your Morning Meeting can happen anywhere in the classroom, I preferred to have my students sitting criss-cross applesauce in a circle on the carpet where we did our phonics lesson. We transitioned right from the morning meeting to calendar time to phonemic awareness and phonics, so it was helpful having it all in one place before moving to centers. You may want to do it at their table, maybe outside, or in a specific spot in the classroom. Keeping it in the same spot will make it easier for you.
When will it take place?
Even though it is a “Morning” Meeting, it does not have to take place first thing in the morning. Maybe you have specials right away in the morning, so you do it when you get back. Or maybe you prefer to do it right before dismissal. Whatever works for your classroom!
What parts do I want to include or not include?
Just because I have 4 parts doesn't mean you need to! I highly suggest reading that book, because they cover a lot more in-depth about morning meetings, including a ton of activity ideas. You may want to do something that they suggest that I don't do. I used the book as a tool and created my own routine for whatever worked best for me and my classroom.
How much time do I have?
Your day is probably pretty limited so try to find at least 10 minutes to do this. If you just cannot find the time, maybe try doing it a few times per week until you can figure out a way to fit it into your schedule.
Read more about the rest of my morning routine in Kindergarten here.