Morning Meetings: Basic Overview

Morning Meetings

I've been thinking since our first class about the morning meetings we had. Dr. Peterson taught us four main components for morning meetings and how the can be meaningful and help our class grow together. That's why I love this quote from Helen Keller:

                                 "Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much"

When we have our classes working together with us then we can make our class succeed beyond anything. If we have each of our students or even ourselves trying to do it alone, we will not get anywhere. So Dr. P gave us four important components that will helps us in our class. It's part of the Crete model and they are greeting, sharing, group activity, news and announcements.

Greeting 

Greeting is a way for each of your students to introduce themselves or a friend in the classroom. This helps your class become more bonded together when you are taking the time to do different greetings that they can enjoy and have fun with. 

Sharing

As cheesy as this sayings can be sometimes, it is also very true. When we give our students a chance to share something about themselves, they begin to build connections to others in the classroom. Students love to share things going on in their life and when you build that safe atmosphere in your class more students will be willing to share. When students begin to open up they begin to care about each other and what happens to one another-again forming that strong bond within your classroom. That strong bond can carry over when differentiation comes into play and you talk about what works for one student may not apply to other students and we should want to help all of our fellow classmates succeed. Do not let sharing time become a therapy session however. There are many different ways you can do sharing time with your class. 

You can:

- select 5 students to share something. 

-do a lightning share where everyone shares something quickly

-have a question that students can answer

-have your share related to one of your lessons for later on

-have half the class share

-have a sign up for who shares, etc. 

Group Activity

The group activity portion can be as simple as having the class as a whole do something together or breaking off into smaller groups or pairs. As long as you get students involved with each other to again build on that sense of community. We did a review with vowels for a group activity that was really neat. It took some of us helping each other out to figure out where we should go, but that's what you want as a teacher! Especially for your morning meetings. 

News and Announcement

This section is pretty straight forward. You'll share your news, announcements and upcoming events for the day. This is also where you can take care of any problems that may have arisen over the past week that haven't been dealt with by the students on their own time. You can do a day overview of the things you'll learn and why you're learning them. You can also talk about reminders for field trips, plays, homework assignments or tests coming up. This section is for the "class business" part of your day. 

This was just a small basic overview of what a morning meeting could look like. There are tons of other resources you can order, google, search amazon for etc to pull off a great morning meeting. Maybe you're telling yourself that you don't have time and that it would be a complete waste of time for the classroom. However, if you get your students into the routine of a morning meeting (which mostly likely won't be easy), you'll inspire them to build  sense of community where they care what happens to each other. When your students truly begin to have that sense of community they want others around them to succeed and it allows you to be able to differentiate more for those that are struggling and allows others in your classroom to shine as their advocates in different subjects within the classroom. Showing your students that they are all good at something is an important quality to have and one way you can do this is by building that trust in your classroom with morning meetings. Give it a shot! Try one out! What have you got to lose? If it fails it fails, don't let it define your classroom or you. If you do it and you succeed then continue to build that close bond with your students/classroom so that you may all proceed to grow together.

Here are websites that can help you learn more about morning meetings:

What is a morning meeting?
Morning Meeting for Beginners
Power of Morning Meetings
Video of a morning meeting
Morning Meeting Examples for Younger Grades