Morning Meeting: The Easy Way

A few years ago, I peeked into one of my colleagues classrooms and noticed her kids were playing an extremely active game that looked a lot like "London Bridge." All of her kids were engaged and she was facilitating the activity. I was inspired and curious and left wondering what this was all about and how I could make it happen in my classroom! I asked her about it and she told me it was part of her morning meeting and shared a great resource with me to help get it started in my classroom.

I ordered this book, read it, and knew I had to implement the morning meeting into my classroom ASAP. There are four key components to the morning meeting: greeting, share, group activity, and morning message. The purpose behind morning meeting is to grow students holistically. Students grow academically, socially, and emotionally and also practice listening and speaking skills. Overall, it's a fun way to enhance language development AND start your day! 

All of these skills, which are essential to academic achievement, must be modeled, practiced and refined. But how can we ensure that it is meaningful AND fun and keep it from becoming a dull routine?! I wanted to mix it up but didn't want something else I had to worry about finding resources and activities for. So I put together my own resource of greetings and games I have learned/acquired/created over the last few years. My resource includes:

• A morning meeting binder cover 
• Morning Meeting weekly planner [helps organize greetings, activities, and share time topics to use each day of the week when/if you feel like planning ahead ;)]
• Share time schedule to keep track of which students will share each day of the week
• List of 12 share time topics to use throughout the year
• 17 greeting task cards (color version)
• 17 greeting task cards (black and white version)
• 20 activity cards (color version)
• 20 activity cards (black and white version)
• Index of printables that go along with some of the activities

Click on the photo below to check out the resource I created:

Pictured below is a fun phonemic awareness game card freebie that can be played whole class or in small groups. My class loves this game and it can be modified and adapted to cover many different phonics skills. If you like this game, be sure to check out my morning meeting resource. It is filled with many other game cards similar to this one!