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Morning Meeting is an engaging way to start each day, build a strong sense of community, and set children up for social and academic success.

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Sample Morning Meetings: Group Activity - Toe-to-Toe

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Welcome to our amazing Classroom Timer Section! We've decided to put our new fun timers, and timers for classrooms into a nice sub-section. These are great timers for children, or maybe meetings, or anything really.

They just add some extra fun to the usual countdown timers :-)

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Welcome to our amazing Classroom Timer Section! We've decided to put our new fun timers, and timers for classrooms into a nice sub-section. These are great timers for children, or maybe meetings, or anything really. They just add some extra fun to the usual countdown timers :-)

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elementary school education effective teaching classroom management community academic engagement social emotional learning morning meeting

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Watch teachers using our research- and evidence-based, time-tested strategies with students in their own classrooms. Look for demonstrations of energizers and author interviews here, too!

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Morning Meetings: Creating a Safe Space for Learning

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Do you often wonder how to keep the sense of comfortable routine while also varying Morning Meetings enough to keep students (and adults) interested and engaged? Greetings can be especially important because they set the tone for the whole meeting-and the whole day. Here is an answer to a question teachers frequently ask. Over the next week, we'll share two more frequently asked questions about greetings.

Question: Students are not showing enthusiasm for greeting the way they did earlier in the year. What can I do?

Answer: First of all, consider why students may be losing enthusiasm. Possibly they've turned a developmental corner. For example, greetings that felt safe and right for mostly seven-year-olds might be feeling too narrow for eight-year-olds, who crave sanctioned ways to vent their boisterous side. Look for greetings that fit students developmentally and you'll likely see a revival of enthusiasm.

Or perhaps you simply need more variety in your greetings. Take a look at the week as a whole and then find ways to vary the greetings from day to day. One day, pass a greeting around the circle; another day, do a group chant as a greeting; another day, do a greeting that gets children up and moving around the room or gives them a choice of whom to greet. Next week, switch to other greetings of the same types.

Here's a greeting that gets students up and moving while also practicing their math facts.

Match Card Greeting

1. Give each student a card on which you've written part of an equation. For example, one student gets a card that says "50 - 35"; another student gets one that says "= 15."

2. Students move around trying to find the match for their card.

3. When students find their match, they greet each other. A simple "Hello" or "Good morning" is fine.

4. Students sit with their matching partner in the order of an equation, visible to the rest of the circle. For example, the student with the "50 - 35" card sits to the right of the student with the "= 15 card."

5. Going around the circle, students announce their equation while holding up their cards so all can see.

Tags: Classroom Meetings

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Making Greeting More Engaging | Responsive Classroom

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Do you often wonder how to keep the sense of comfortable routine while also varying Morning Meetings enough to keep students (and adults) interested and engaged? Greetings can be especially important because they set the tone for the whole meeting-and the whole day. Here is an answer to a question teachers frequently ask.

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Do you think a lot about how to create Morning Meetings that positively impact each day and prepare your students for the learning to come? I'll share a little secret that has worked for me: Try planning Morning Meeting after you do your lesson plans for the rest of the day. Morning Meeting is one of the first chances I have to set the tone for the day, so I find that taking the time to consider the flow and goals of each day helps me plan a meeting that sets my students up for success.

For instance, if I know we'll have a busy Monday morning with an assembly first thing and a practice fire drill, I might plan to begin with a left/right greeting in which students quickly greet and are greeted by the students standing on either side of them. This fast-paced but friendly greeting starts a busy day on a positive tone while also allowing time for a slightly lengthier sharing about past weekend activities, which is always a hot topic on a Monday morning.

On a day when I'm planning to focus on the revision process during Language Arts in the afternoon, I may bring this into the sharing component of Morning Meeting by inviting students to share with a partner what they're writing about and strategies they might use to revise and edit their writing later in the day.

I may also get students' brains fired up for the task ahead with a morning message that asks them to share ideas about "what good writers do." This sets the stage for Language Arts and also forecasts for students what they'll be working on later on in the day. A struggling writer might appreciate the reminder, and an enthusiastic writer will have something to look forward to.

And what do we need first thing on a day when I know our time will be packed with academics, with no breaks for specials? Maybe a high-energy greeting like "Chugga Chugga," which allows students to move, sing, dance, and choose multiple partners to greet, or a movement activity like Freeze Dance. Being physically active and a bit silly together in the morning will help us get our energy up and prepare for a long day of staying focused.

Finally, on a Friday morning that will be full of testing, I might include an activity like Sparkle in our Morning Meeting. This playful activity offers students a helpful review of the words they've been learning all week, while also helping them relax and reduce any anxiety they might be feeling. Spelling Stroll would be another good choice. By offering students the chance to move around and choose where to go in the circle, this activity promotes autonomy and assertiveness, while giving students practice in thinking quickly.

There is a feeling of satisfaction that comes from looking at a set of carefully crafted Morning Meeting plans that integrate well with the daily life of our classroom. Planning my Morning Meetings after I do my lesson planning-whether for a whole week or day by day-lets me help students focus at the start of each day with meetings specifically tailored to their needs. Each day's Morning Meeting should truly be a reflection of the day ahead, so try planning the beginning with the middle and the end in mind.

Tags: Classroom Meetings, Language Arts, Sharing

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Morning Meeting Lesson Plans . . . Where to Begin? | Responsive Classroom

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Do you think a lot about how to create Morning Meetings that positively impact each day and prepare your students for the learning to come? I'll share a little secret that has worked for me: Try planning Morning Meeting after you do your lesson plans for the rest of the day.

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How can you keep the sense of comfortable routine while also varying Morning Meetings enough to keep students (and adults) interested and engaged? Greetings can set the tone for the whole meeting-and the whole day.

Question: Coming up with enough greetings to keep things varied and fun takes time-the one thing I don't have! How can I keep up?

Answer: Variety is important, but that doesn't mean you have to change the greeting every day. It's more important to gauge students' interest level: If they're enjoying a greeting-perhaps even asking for it-keep using it!

But it's also a good idea to continue building the class's stock so you can switch things up when you need to. One way to gather new greetings is to ask colleagues to share ones their students enjoy.

And remember that students themselves are excellent resources. When you ask for their help adapting familiar greetings or even coming up with new ones, their enthusiasm is sure to rise. Here's a greeting devised by a fourth grader. It can be adapted for all grade levels and is especially useful early in the year when students are learning one another's names.

Say Your Name

1. The whole class begins chanting the refrain: Say your name and when you do, we will say it back to you!

2. The first child then says his or her name aloud: Melanie!

3. In unison, the whole class repeats the name: Melanie!

4. The whole class chants the refrain again as the greeting continues around the circle.

Say Your Name is an example of a greeting that can be easily varied to feel new. Each student can use a different voice-soft, deep, high-pitched, spooky, etc.-which the whole class then echoes. Students can sing the refrain in rap style, add hand-clapping and thigh tapping, or clap out the number of syllables in their names. To make the greeting livelier, students can add a movement to go with their names, which the class then mimics when they repeat the name.

Here's another greeting that's easy to vary. A bonus: it folds in sharing for those busy days when you have less time for Morning Meeting.

Hullaballoo

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Call out a direction from each category on the chart. For example, "Tiptoe, handshake, favorite book."

Students tiptoe around the room to find a partner and greet them with a handshake. Partners then tell each other their favorite book.

Ring a bell to signal a new round. Call out three new directions. Students move, greet, and share in those designated ways.

Continue for three or four rounds.

Building Classroom Community, Classroom Meetings, Middle of the Year

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Easy Ways to Vary Morning Meeting Greetings | Responsive Classroom

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How can you keep the sense of comfortable routine while also varying Morning Meetings enough to keep students (and adults) interested and engaged? Greetings can set the tone for the whole meeting-and the whole day. Answer: Variety is important, but that doesn't mean you have to change the greeting every day.

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A Standards-Based Approach to Morning Meeting Sharing

Ryan holds up the book so all his classmates can see the cover and begins: " Reptile Facts is my favorite first grade book. Every first grader should read this book because it shares facts about reptiles." He displays a few pages showing similarities between reptiles and humans that he'd marked beforehand with sticky notes.

He glances at his sharing planning sheet and continues: "This book makes jokes out of learning, and it teaches you about how some reptiles are endangered. This book is really fun. I'm ready for a reply."

Ms. Young reminds the class, "First, think about what Ryan said." Hands begin to rise around the circle, but Ryan gives his classmates time to think before calling on Emma.

"Is the book only about things that are the same about reptiles and humans, or are there other animals in it, too?" she asks. Ryan answers, "It also talks about other animals like zebras, eagles, and vultures. It also tells you what's different."

The next question, from Pete, is: "Can you tell us more about why you think every first grader should read this book?" In his reply Ryan describes another aspect of the book he thinks his classmates will enjoy: "The pictures show how things would look if you were actually there."

Ryan takes a few more questions and comments before Ms. Young brings the sharing to a close. As Ryan puts his book and notes away, Ms. Young reminds the class that they will be able to look at Reptile Facts later.

Then she directs the class's attention to a nearby chart showing types of questions, a topic the class has been focusing on. They categorize the questions Ryan was asked during his sharing before moving on to the rest of the day's Morning Meeting.

This example of a dialogue share is what Morning Meeting sharing looks and sounds like by the end of the school year in a first grade classroom at Hyde-Addison Elementary School in Washington, D.C. In this sharing, students employed an array of communication skills, and the whole class was engaged in a learning conversation.

We build toward this outcome gradually over time, by deliberately teaching many specific speaking, listening, and questioning skills. The benefits of doing so infuse our school days: as a result of this focus on teaching communication skills we see students having better partner chats, more productive turn-and-talks, and more focused and engaging group discussions.

Guided by the Common Core

The Common Core State Standards for Speaking and Listening describe communication skills that students are expected to have at each grade level. We used the standards for kindergarten, first, and second grade to guide our thinking about what skills to teach and to assess students' progress. For example, the dialogue sharing described in the opening of this article showed us that the group was now able to meet first grade standards by "following agreed-upon rules in discussions . . . speaking one at a time . . . through multiple exchanges" and illustrated several children's skill at asking informational and clarifying questions. We also observed that Ryan, the child who shared, met first grade standards for presentation of knowledge and ideas.

Because this level of conversational skill does not come automatically to most first graders, meeting CCSS Speaking and Listening standards requires teaching skills explicitly and giving children plenty of opportunities to practice and hone those skills. Many children this age come to school without much experience in having the sorts of rich conversations the CCSS describe. So a first step for us was to identify times of day when students might practice having discussions with a partner or a group on a focused topic.

Why Do This Work at Sharing?

We identified Morning Meeting-and sharing in particular-as a prime time to work on developing conversation skills in part because we didn't want our students to have to juggle mastering skills and new content simultaneously. During sharing, we could focus intensively on listening and speaking skills while discussing personal and academic topics that children already knew a lot about.

We also recognized that all three of the Morning Meeting sharing formats (around-the-circle, partner, and dialogue) could help support students as they acquired and mastered communication skills. For instance, the around-the-circle format gives every child a chance to participate; it's a good choice for times when our focus is on teaching and assessing foundational skills such as speaking audibly and making eye contact. The partner sharing format provides every child with an opportunity to speak, listen, and respond, and invites participation by children who are not yet comfortable speaking to a large group. Dialogue sharing provides an opportunity for practicing presentation and questioning skills; we teach it after we've laid the other groundwork for students' success.

Supports for Learning

Since we started this work, we've found lots of ways to support our students' learning of communications skills at Morning Meeting sharing. Here are some examples:

"Who Remembers?"

To encourage careful listening, we often challenge students to recall what they heard and report back to the group. We use this technique with all sharing formats. For instance, at the beginning of the year, after a simple around-the-circle sharing on favorite fruits, we'd ask, "Who remembers the person in our class who likes grapes best?" and "Who remembers someone who likes the same fruit as you?" We've found that adding this element is well worth the small amount of time it involves; for many of our students, knowing that they might have a chance to share what they'd heard with the larger group is highly motivating and leads them to listen with care.

A "Me, Too" Signal

Children's instinctive response to sharing is often to say "me, too." To save talk time for higher-level responses, we teach students a silent hand gesture they can use to show their connections without interrupting the speaker.

Building Conversations With Blocks

To emphasize turn-taking and show how a conversation can "build" through multiple exchanges, we demonstrate with blocks. A teacher and a student model first, chatting as they build a tower out of red and blue Unifix Cubes. The teacher uses red cubes and the student uses blue; each person places a block each time they take a turn speaking, producing a tower with an alternating pattern. After this demonstration, students try building conversation towers for themselves as they chat with partners.

Starters and Frames

As we introduce different ways to build sentences and form questions, we post charts for children to refer to during sharing. For example, a chart about questions initially featured starters for information-seeking queries: "I'd like to know more about ____" and "I noticed that ____." Later, when we introduced clarifying questions, we added more, such as: "So you're saying that ____", "It sounds like ____", and "So do you mean ____?"

High-Interest Topics

Children listen better if they are engaged, so we try to choose topics for sharing that will excite our students. Early in the year, highly engaging topics tend to be low-risk, personal questions that help us get to know each other. For example, "Do you prefer brownies or cookies?" is one that all of our first grade students have opinions about.

We weave in more academic connections as the year goes on. For instance, near the culmination of a unit in which the class had raised butterflies, we posed the question "How do you feel about letting our butterflies go?" for a partner sharing. The discussions students had on this topic were quite rich; they listened carefully to each other and spoke at length, using details and drawing upon what they knew about butterflies.

Well-Prepared Sharers

To help children prepare for being the sharer in the dialogue sharing format, we developed and taught students how to use a planning template to organize their thoughts. With a family member or a teacher (or both) students would decide on a main idea, supporting details, and a concluding statement for their sharing. They'd also use this template to plan out visual displays, such as which pages of a book to show or what to point out about an artifact. Sharers brought these notes with them and were encouraged to refer to them during their presentation, as Ryan did in the opening example. Here is a letter to parents and planning template these authors developed for a month focused on "All About" shares:

Letter to Families

This month at Morning Meeting children will share about something that they know all about. For example, Ms. Walsh knows all about painting, and I shared that I know all about baking. For our "all about" shares we will use a format that helps the children practice providing details to support a main idea. Here, as an example, is what I said when I shared about baking:

I know all about baking.
I know that when you're baking it is really important to measure the ingredients carefully.
I know that you bake things in a hot oven so you need to be careful.
I know that you can bake lots of different kinds of things like bread, cookies, or cake.
I love baking and sharing yummy food with my family and friends.

The calendar on this message shows when your child is scheduled to do his or her "all about" share. Being prepared to share is part of your child's homework! On the day of their sharing, children should bring in a photo, drawing, or artifact from their area of expertise and have planned what they will say when they share. A planning template is attached. We want children to use the template as a support rather than a script, so when you work with your child to plan their share, fill it out using words or phrases rather than complete sentences.

Planning Template for "All About" Shares

I know all about: _____________________________

Concluding statement: ___________________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________________

Purpose-Filled Morning Meetings

Supports like these have helped our students build key skills and at the same time have elevated Morning Meeting sharing in our classrooms to a new level. We've been doing Morning Meeting for years and long appreciated the way this Morning Meeting component builds community and reinforces communication skills. Now that we have more deliberately woven in teaching specific speaking and listening skills, this part of our day plays an even more vital instructional role. With Morning Meeting as our proving ground, we've been able to meet the challenge of standards-based teaching in ways that feel meaningful, purposeful, and full of joy.
Kathleen Sheehy is the instructional coach and a former first grade teacher at Hyde-Addison Elementary School in Washington, D.C. She was the District of Columbia Teacher of the Year in 2008.

Emily Young teaches first grade at Hyde-Addison. She has used the Responsive Classroom approach to guide her teaching for ten years.

Tags: Building Classroom Community, Common Core, Conversation Skills, Engaging Academics, Listening Skills, Sharing, Testing

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Ryan holds up the book so all his classmates can see the cover and begins: " Reptile Facts is my favorite first grade book. Every first grader should read this book because it shares facts about reptiles." He displays a few pages showing similarities between reptiles and humans that he'd marked beforehand with sticky notes.

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Responsive Classroom Morning Meeting is a great way to set a positive tone for the day of learning ahead while also having fun and building community. It's also a great way to give students rich experience with the language arts. Into each meeting component-greeting, sharing, group activity, and morning message-teachers...