Morning Meeting Greetings

As you know, we have a morning meeting (or afternoon meeting, depending on our schedule) each day in my classroom.  We love saying hello in many different ways!  Here are a few ways we've been greeting each other lately.  If you want to use them in your classroom, just click on the image for a freebie.

Dice Roll

Roll the dice and  find the sum (or difference, depending on the skill you're practicing).  

Count that many people around the circle.

Shake hands with the person you end on.

I use giant dice for this.  I got these as a gift from an AMAZING PE teacher who used them in his class:

And I bought these at Mardel for when we are just starting out.  They also work well in the lower grades.  You can also use them to build number sense.  So, instead of finding the sum, you could roll 1 die and count that many people to greet.

 

Who Rocks the House?

Say this chant, with each child taking a turn dancing in the center of the circle.

Who rocks the house?

(Child's name) rocks the house!

And when (child's name) rocks the house,

She rocks it

all the way down!

 Hickety Pickety Bumble Bee

Hello in Many Languages

Choose a language.  Choose a person to start.

The person who is starting turns to the person next to him/her and says, "Hello (child's name)" in the selected language.

The greeting is then passed around the circle.

A few ways to say hello: jambo, hola, bonjour, hodi, kon'nichiwa

Multidigit Addition Match Up

Each person takes 1 card and solves the addition problem on it.

Students sit in a circle and take turns greeting the person with the matching sum.

Note: Some of the cards intentional have similar sums to help scholars work on accuracy.  We do this as a whole group the first few times, so we can double check our work.  After that, we might solve and find the person matching sum without sitting in a circle.

Morning Meeting

I have hosted a daily class meeting nearly every day since I started teaching.  This year, I moved to a new district, received some seriously awesome PD, and began questioning whether I was wasting time with my daily meetings.  I wondered if I would have more time for content if I removed the meeting.  After all, a quality meeting takes about 15-20 minutes, and my instruction during that time isn't necessarily standards-based.  

I experimented with having meetings only twice a week and using share time to cover specific content.  After about a month, I realized that my students weren't as focused on their work, and I wasn't as focused on teaching.  Sadly, we were focused on resolving conflicts, setting goals about using physical violence to solve problems at school, and handling social concerns.  Temper tantrums in my classroom were at an all-time high.

Enter the return of Morning Meeting!  I know this sounds crazy, but I definitely noticed a difference on the days we had our class meetings... So I brought them back.  I modified the content to better fit the meeting structure and returned to running the meeting the way Responsive Classroom suggests, with a few additions from Open Circle. 

My classroom is back to running smoothly, and I am no longer spending every waking moment trying to figure out how to solve behavior problems that I haven't ever experienced before.  It turns out, I was having a tricky year, because I removed some of the structures that helped the students learn social skills they were applying throughout the day.  Never again!

There's SO MUCH that I could say about Morning Meeting, why it's awesome, and how to run it.  Here are a few basics to get you started if you've never done it before.  Stay tuned for more specific details and ways I've started embedding content into our meeting in a way that is a little more authentic and effective for both the social skills and the content.

If you've never tried it before, please let me know how it goes!  I'm rooting for you! 

Here's the template I created to plan my meetings. Click HERE for the freebie.

Typically, I plan the meetings at the beginning of the year.  Once students get used to the structure and know a bunch of greetings and activities, I step out of it and allow them to choose what they'd like to do.  This is a gradual process, of course, and it allows them to take on leadership and ownership of some of our activities.

I also run the meeting at the beginning of the year.  This year, I led the meeting for the first month of school.  In fourth and fifth grade, I only run it for a week.  In Kindergarten, I ran it for the first half of the year.  Once we have our first class election, I invite the president to take over the meeting.  Other teachers I know have had the student of the week run the meeting.

Once the president takes over, I really only lead the message portion of the meeting.  Each day, my students enter the classroom and read the morning message, which is a letter I've written to them. 

At the beginning of this in kindergarten, the message looked like this:

Here's a letter I recently used in second grade.  We were working on stamina and reading the WHOLE way through something to glean all the information, so it's much longer than a usual letter.

As I said, I love Morning Meeting and teaching social skills, and I'd love to hear how it's working in your classroom!  Please share your wisdom (or questions) in the comments or shoot me an email and let me know what's working (or not) for you.

Peek at My Week and a Freebie!

I am looking forward to this week at school, because I feel like we are really back in the groove after Spring Break!  We've applied a lot of what I learned from my visit to Village Tech, and I'm looking forward to seeing them achieve their goals.

Here's a look at what's going on in our classroom:

We are having an absolute blast with our poetry unit.  This week, I'm looking forward to seeing their personal growth as poets.  It's at about this time in our unit that I start to see tremendous growth, so I'm really ready for the school week to begin!  If you need additional resources for your poetry unit, click the image below!

We are still using our daily income cards to track what we've earned for each part of our day.  At the end of the week, we find the total amount we've earned and make a deposit into our bank accounts.  Then, we reflect on our work and set goals for next week.

For our Afternoon Meeting, we'll be using several greetings.  Most of the time, I'll invite the students to choose and give them options to choose from.

One of the choices will be this Measurement Match by Unique Teaching, which will help us review units.  Students will find the person with the matching card and greet them with a handshake.



We will also use my Multi-digit Addition Match Up activity.  Click the image for a FREEBIE!



We'll also use some of our old favorites, such as dice roll, hola, jambo, and the 1 minute greeting.

Enjoy the week, and be sure to check out what's going on with everyone else this week!  Many thanks to Mrs. Wills for hosting the link up!