All About: The Morning Meeting

We are a classroom family!  Families need to have time to talk to each other and learn from each other.  In our classroom, we always start our day with a morning meeting and end our day with an afternoon meeting.  It is a great way to start our day and set goals and when we meet in the afternoon, it gives us a chance to wrap up our day and reflect on the goals we set.

In this blog post, I will explain the parts of the morning meeting.

The Morning Meeting

Greeting

We always start the morning meeting with a greeting.  The busy bee chooses a way to greet (right now they can choose from saying 'good morning' or 'hola'.  We take turns going around the circle and saying good morning to the person next to us.  We make sure we look at the person and say their name. We will add different ways to greet each other as the year progresses.  This is a great way to start our day!

Busy Bee Share and Tell
After we greet each other,  The Busy Bee shares something (either a special thing or special information) by going around the circle and then telling us a little information about it.  The children then ask the Busy Bee questions about their special thing or information.

News and Events in the School and Classroom
After the Busy Bee shares, I discuss news and events in the school and in the classroom.  This is a great time to talk about any special events going on at school and it is also is a great time to discuss and review our "Spotless" behaviors in our classroom.  Everyday, we have a conversation as a class about how we need to act at school and in the classroom.  We pick a "Spotless Behavior" of the day to focus on, but then we discuss other positive behaviors that will help us have a successful day.

 The class tries to earn the letters found in "Spotless" through out the day.  Once the class earns the word spotless, they receive special things like Extra Recess.  During the morning meeting, the Busy Bee sets a goal for the day.  We discuss what letter we want to get to by the end of the day.  If we reach our goal by the end of the day, the students receive a "Bonus" letter.

Calendar Activities
During calendar activities, the Busy Bee becomes the "Teacher."  We discuss the date, put a straw in the place value chart and discuss if the number is odd or even.  The Busy Bee gets to call on other students.

We also do a lot of calendar activities on the smartboard every morning.  

Morning Message 
After calendar activities, we read the weekly morning message.  We read the same message all week long to build fluency!  We also look for and circle different types of words each day.

Our Schedule 

Finally, our morning meeting ends with us going over the schedule for the day.  Our schedule is an interactive smartboard document that we use throughout the day.  We go over the entire schedule in the morning and then refer to it all day long.  It is a great way to stay on track and the students know exactly what is going to happen next in our day!

At the end of each day, we meet again in a circle to discuss our day.  We congratulate our Busy Bee for doing an awesome job and we check to see if we reached our goal.  The afternoon meeting is a great way to wrap up our day!

Having the children meet as a group is an amazing way to promote classroom community and responsibility.  We are a classroom family and we all work together to have the best days in first grade!