Morning meetings are a time for all of your students to join together as a community to start the day. There are so many morning meeting resources, and the question is how do you dig through them and figure out which ones to use?
I’m here to share with you what I use as a first grade responsive classroom teacher, and to give you some resources to help you out!
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Morning meetings are an important part of any classroom community. If you know about morning meetings, you’re also probably familiar with Responsive Classroom, as they are known for their training around morning meetings.
About morning meetings
Before we dig into morning meeting resources, let’s talk about what morning meetings are.
What is it?
Interactive morning meetings are a daily activity where students and teachers join together to start the day. Based on the activity from Responsive Classroom, it is a 20-30 minute activity where everyone gathers in a circle to complete 4 activities: greeting, share, activity, and message. Teachers work to build community and trust, support academics and reinforce positive behaviors. Interactive morning meetings teach valuable social and emotional skills through interactive read alouds, interactive activities and daily routines. If done correctly, morning meetings can transform your classroom
Why we should do them
- Builds a strong sense of community
- Creates a daily routine to bridge home and school
- Strengthens relationships and connections between students and teachers
- Promotes social awareness
- Encourages positive behaviors
- Starts the day in a positive way
- Makes each student feel important and significant
- Supports social, emotional, and academic learning
- Sets the tone for responsible, respectful learning
How to do it
Starting a morning meeting routine is one of the best things you can do for your students and your classroom. When you begin doing morning meetings in your classroom, start short and sweet. It is important for all components to be included, but make it easy on yourself and your students. Start with greetings and activities that are low-risk so everyone feels comfortable and safe. It’s ok to repeat greetings and activities so students learn and practice the expectations. As your meetings grow, so will your students and their comfort level.
Morning Meeting Components
Let’s also quickly talk about the parts of a typical morning meeting. A morning meeting has four daily components that should be completed.
- Greeting
- Share
- Activity
- Message
GREETING: Teachers and students greet each other by name, making sure that everyone is included.
SHARE: Students share information about their lives while others listen.
ACTIVITY: Everyone works together to complete an activity that encourages working together and supports social and academic learning.
MESSAGE: Teachers share announcements that prepare students for the day.
I’m not going to go into the components too much today, that’s for another blog post. But I want to reiterate the importance of doing each of those steps daily.
Morning Meeting Resources
So now, let’s talk about some awesome resources that will help you plan some amazing morning meetings. As I said earlier, Responsive Classroom really is the GURU when it comes to morning meetings. They have done their research and have fantastic trainings to support you.
Books to start with
Along with their website, I love their books. They are extremely user friendly and give fantastic ideas you can implement immediately in your classroom.
These two books are definitely ones to start with.
Even as a veteran teacher, I still use The First Six Weeks of School book EVERY year. It walks you through each day and each week of the beginning of the school year. It goes through how to introduce routines and expectations and truly sets you up for a great year!
The Morning Meeting Book is good because it walks you through each of the 4 morning meeting components, why you should do them, and gives you so many tips, tricks, and ideas you can implement immediately in your meeting.
I would argue that these books have changed the way I teach, and how I think about building routines, teaching expectations, and creating. a classroom community.
Lesson Plans & Activities
If you’re new to morning meeting or want some easy to follow lesson plans for K-2, I would also suggest checking out my Interactive Morning Meeting lesson plans and activities for All Are Welcome.
This resource also walks you through a morning meeting and gives you specific lesson plans and activities for each component for an entire week. Each of the activities focuses around the social-emotional competencies that are taught using the book.
For each component, greeting, share, activity, and message, you get day-by-day lesson instructions, and printables (or slides if you’re virtual) to use to do each part.
If you’re wanting to try morning meeting in your classroom, this is definitely a morning meeting resource you should check out!
More Books
As a teacher who has been doing morning meeting and responsive classroom for some time, I’ve been looking for more morning meeting resources that can help me.
I have found these to be extremely helpful too.
This first one is a book my first grade PLC team did as a book study. We read and implemented the strategies they suggest in our classrooms and really enjoyed this book.
So much of being a Responsive Classroom is the words and language we use. This book supports your use of language in the classroom.
I have also found these books helpful. They give so many tips, tricks, and ideas. to keep morning meeting fresh and fun!
Are you interested in more Responsive Classroom resources? Check out my Amazon store, >>HERE<<!
More Ways to Build Community
It can be argued that one of the best ways to build community is through morning meeting. While I believe that to be true, I also know that there are other great ways to do it.
Check out these other blog posts of mine for more ways to build community:
As always, please share and pin for others to see.
