What do you do during your Morning Meeting

[Tonya0581]

I strongly want to use morning meeting this school year. I want to cover the following things
~daily objectives
~daily news
~time to share about anything exciting

AND I also want to do some sort of team building exercise to set the tone of the day! What are some team building activities do you do with your kiddos AND/OR what do you do during your Morning Meeting???

 

[happygirl444]

We do a Responsive Classroom Morning Meeting. There are four components, they are:

Greeting (children quickly greet each other): I use many types of greetings to make it interesting and fun.

Sharing (children share "important news"): I have a schedule and they take turns sharing and answering questions and making comments

Activity (children participate in a community building or academic community building activity): We do lots of different activities that build our community and enhance our academics. We do lots of games, songs, poetry presentations, etc.

Message (I write a message to the kids every day that has a place for them to respond to and bridges our meeting into academics):

Dear Fantastic First Graders,

Today is Monday, April 2, 2010. Sonya is the line leader and the helper today.

We will read a book called Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Think about a terrible day you've had and what happened. Put your name on the chart if you would like to share. We're going to make connections with Alexander today!

Sincerely,
Miss R


Morning Meeting starts our day in a positive way and it really meets the kids' needs of belonging, signficance and fun. I saw a big positive difference in the way my kids interacted with each other and my behavior problems went down after implementing Morning Meeting. A great book is The Morning Meeting Book by Roxanne Kriete. Good luck!

 

[m3g]

Greetings

Special event announcements (kids can announce something they did or are going to do)

This day in history (One kid per day, every day)

Goals for the day (What I want to see done/worked on, learned)

Schedule items (What and when..computer lab? Library? Assembly? etc)

Changes This is where I let the kids suggest changes to the schedule. I always ask why and if they have a good reason and I don't have a good reason for not changing the time I do it. I'll let kids suggest more/less time on a certain activity depending on how much time they need as well.

6th grade-self contained.

I used to do bell work (Daily Oral Language or Math ) before this but am thinking that SSR will be the bell work...Book Whisperer style.

 

[deb603]

Do you have the Morning Meeting book? It's full of great ideas. It has pages of team building activities in the back organized by different criteria. I highly recommend it.

 

[jlosun]

body language and eye contact

An essential ingredient with Responsive classrooms is each student giving eye contact and proper body language.

Some of the cool chants- (in the book) are kid friendly and quick!

Stepping away from rewards/stickers is extremely important.