Well, we are officially on our third full week of school.
All things considered, we are trucking right along and my kiddos and I are fast
becoming family. One way I build classroom community is through Morning
Meeting. A couple of years ago I read The Morning Meeting Book and The First
Six Weeks of School. If you haven’t read these books or been to their website
click here for more information. Basically, The Responsive Classroom advocates
for not only a culture of learning and high student achievement, but also an
improved school climate.
My Morning Meeting, from start to finish takes about 20
minutes. I timed it every day this week for you and averaged them out. This is what it looks like in my classroom.
1 Greeting
(5 mins)– I have a student leader
each day. I’ll blog about that another time. The student leader gets to pick
the type of greeting we do. Often students choose “silly greetings” like a
witch voice, or whisper greeting. Always at the beginning of the year we do
“formal greetings” which look like this “Good morning _________! My name is
____________.” Students also shake hands. (It’s to die for adorable) Always, we
sit in a giant circle on the carpet and we go one at a time watching and
listening to our friends greet one another. We practice this chant (and do
little hand motions) before we begin each day.
1.
Do a full
turn.
2.
Make
strong eye contact.
3.
Speak in
a strong, clear voice.
4.
Don’t
shake their hand off, don’t let your hand flop.
Share (5
mins) – Again, my share has changed over the years as well. When I taught
upper elementary, I had students sign up to share and we had three shares a day
and you could never share back-to-back days. Now that I teach first grade and I
utilize a student leader, I just have the student leader share. I also find
that primary students and their parents are looking for a “show and tell” type
deal and they like to be able to plan ahead on days that they can bring in
something to share. Students know in advance when they will be the student
leader so it works out beautifully having them do the share that day.
I’ve learned that regardless of the grade
students need to be taught what it really means to share. At the beginning of
the year especially, but always really, I model storytelling. I constantly tell
little stories about things that happened to me that weekend, or that morning.
I tell some big, exciting stories (my husband and I went to Iceland this
summer), but mostly I tell simple stories (my dog snuggled up with me this
morning while I was drinking my coffee). I am doing this same kind of important
modeling during Writing Workshop because I want my students to understand that
their lives are interesting and that they have something worthy of
sharing.
Let’s not forget that children need to be
taught how to ask questions and give comments. Can I get an Amen? Seriously, I
can’t tell you how many times a child will ask the sharer a question that they
literally just answered in their share.
Attentive listening is a key focus in our classroom and I am constantly
asking a child to repeat what another child said, or add onto something that
was just said.
We practice this chant (and do little hand
motions) before we begin share each day. It’s a reminder to the person sharing
and the rest of the class, too.
1.
This
is a community share and not a private share. A community share is a share
meant for everyone to hear.
2.
We’ll
take 3 questions and comments so listen up!
3 Group
Activity (5 mins) – This is anything that gets them UP and interacting! If
you had just been sitting on the carpet for 15 minutes you’d need up too! Often
it is a Kagan Structure. So far, on the third week of school, my kiddos only
know Stand Up, Hand Up and Quiz, Quiz, Trade. We’ve been perfecting those. With
Stand Up, Hand Up I’ll call out a question for them to ask their partner and
with Quiz, Quiz, Trade they’ve been using a deck of alphabet or number cards. I
am also really getting into music in the classroom this year so lately we’ve
been adding on a sight word song or two from Heidi’s Songs. (She’s kind of a
big deal and very much amazing!)
4.
Morning
Message (5 mins)-- Over the
years, my morning message procedure has looks different based on the grade
level I was teaching. For instance, when I taught third and fourth graders my
students copied down the morning message as morning work (always a letter from
me to the class) and corrected the purposeful mistakes I had made. Capitalization
mistakes were corrected in green colored pencil. Punctuation mistakes were
corrected in red colored pencil. Spelling and word choice mistakes were
corrected in blue colored pencil.
On the other hand, in my first grade
classroom the Morning Message looks very different. For one, I decided that I
didn’t want my students looking at incorrect writing (we have another time in
the day when we correct mistakes) so the message has no errors. Students help
me label the 5 parts of a friendly letter and fill in some blanks that I’ve
purposefully left. It’s also a great time to practice sight words that we’re
currently learning.
I hope that helps all of you! Morning Meeting
sure has helped me out over the years!
