Shout out: Morning Meeting Posted on February 27th, 2013 by

At the beginning of the semester, the class learned about Morning Meeting. In Morning Meeting, the class greets each other, shares, participates in a game or activity, and reads news and announcements. The purpose is to have fun, build community and develop social and academic skills.

This shout out is to all the teacher candidates in our class who have led Morning Meeting for this semester! We’ve had a lot of fun and gotten to know each other better. I hope that you bring Morning Meeting to your future students.

DSC01138

What did you like about Morning Meeting? What questions do you still have? Any favorite memories? Feel free to do a “shout out” or comment.

 


6 Comments

  1. Joshua Timmerman says:

    Participating in these morning meeting activities, as students and as teachers, is a wonderful way to start out our class periods. Not only are these activities fun and engaging for us as the students, but they also are great learning experiences for us as perspective teachers. It has been wonderful being able to practice morning meeting in our course and then to be able to observe morning meetings in the elementary schools during our practicum experience. It is very helpful to visualize and experiment with what works well in the classroom and with what could use some improvement. I am looking forward to learning more about morning meeting and each of the individual aspects that correlate with morning meeting.

  2. Casey Dowling says:

    The other day at work I was discussing with one teacher about the energy level in the preschool room. We were talking about how the students don’t truly grasp the importance of structure, and are very high energized throughout the day. We brought up the idea of introducing morning meetings into the daily schedule to provide students with more of a system and routine. I see morning meetings as an extremely important part of the day that could be very beneficial in our classroom. The students will be presented with the schedule and expectations from the start of the day, which would leave a very positive impact.

  3. Caitlin Bonde says:

    During our J-term in the schools (Freshman year) I was in a 3rd grade classroom which utilized morning meeting everyday. Now that I know more about it, it makes me appreciate what the teacher was implementing so much more. I witnessed the students showing polite manners to each other during the greetings, having lots of opportunities for sharing, and starting the day with a fun activity. It really set the mood for the rest of the day. Having this practice during class time has been a great way to get ideas from classmates and explore different ways of using it in our future classroom. Morning meeting is such a great way to build a positive classroom environment and beneficial jump start to the day. Shout out to everyone who has taught morning meetings so far! It has been a lot of fun!

  4. Jenna Johnson says:

    I agree with Stephanie about observing morning meeting in our practicum this week. I am in a different kindergarten classroom but my class did have a morning meeting. It was not formatted the same way we had learned in class so it was interesting to see. As I think though about the classroom I am in, the students did a version of a morning meeting I think that was beneficial to them. The students still did a greeting but spent more time do activities such as singing, math, and writing. The students also got a chance to share but not in the same context in the morning meeting learned about in our method classes. I think this still built a community for the students and kept them active just like kindergarten students need in the classroom.

  5. Stephanie Glaser says:

    I think Morning Meeting is a great place to start the day; it gets students interacting with each other and warmed up. This past week I observed my coordinating teacher in my practicum placement using Morning Meeting, and she used interactive writing with the students to write the Morning Message. I thought this was a good way to involve the students in using more literacy, but the downfall was that the message then lacked the agenda for the day. Her version of Morning Meeting unfortunately also lacked a time for students to share (a crucial part of Morning Meeting in my opinion).

    • Kara Peterson says:

      After learning about the different sections of a Morning Meeting- greeting, sharing, activity, and news and announcements- I could not help but try and pick out each part during our first day in our kindergarten practicum. I was in the same classroom as Stephanie, and agree that our cooperating teacher did an excellent job of involving students through the interactive writing; however, as was already stated, the students did not have the opportunity to share. While I understand that educators have a lot to fit into a day, I thought sharing would have been especially nice in this circumstance as it would have allowed me and my three other practicum partners an opportunity to get to know all of the students of the class better. Overall, now that I have a better understanding of what goes into a Morning Meeting, I would like to observe more classrooms (i.e. with a more experienced teacher, a first year teacher, different grade levels, etc.) to see how the Morning Meeting is being implemented and what seems to work and what doesn’t.