There is so much out there about a "morning meeting" in an early elementary classroom. Typically classes will start their day all together, going over their schedule for the day, introducing any new activities, and, of course, reading a morning message. But what does a morning message look like? That depends on the school/teacher. You might have been trained in Responsive Classroom or another model that highlights the importance of this class meeting and a daily message. I've tried a couple different kinds of message over the last 7 years and I want to hear your opinion on which is your favorite.
First of all, I tend to refer to this time as "class meeting" or "circle" rather than a morning meeting, mostly because up until last year, I've taught half day classes and it's not technically a morning meeting if it's 1:00 pm. Also, it shows the students that this is an important time of the day, and connects to when I have to leave the room for meetings.
Each year I feel like I learn more and more about the "best" way to write my message. I started my career in second grade, and our message looked something like the message below with more variation as the year went on. I would model skills we were developing in FUNdations or Reader's Workshop, like how I scooped these words to practice fluency.
11/9/17
Good Morning Class,
Today is Thursday, November 9, 2017. Miss D is losing her voice so she needs help from you all today! Are you up for the challenge?
Love,
Mrs. Ford and Miss Dominguez
So when I went to prek, I kept the same model of "Today is __. We have __. We will learn __. Love, (teacher name)". I tried a couple different versions, one that was already filled in and one that we filled in together. I used this model to enforce the pattern (it stayed the same every day) and think aloud while writing. Hmm... it is Wednesday. Wednesday sounds like /w/. Do you know what letter I use to write the /w/ sound?
Then I spent a year as a resource teacher and got to see so many different ways of teaching when I visited my students in their classrooms. I saw similar models to what I was used to and plenty of others. When I transitioned back to my own classroom, again in PreK, I took one of my favorite models with me. The message would be covered up and could only be revealed with a song. Typically there were two messages, though sometimes there were more by the end of the year. The class would sing "secret message number 1, number 1, number 1. Secret message number 1, what will it say?" (I changed from "morning" to "secret," again because I had a morning and an afternoon class). Then the circle helper of the day would remove the number 1 and we'd decipher the message together. The message would vary - it could be the special we had that day, the topic we were exploring, or a reminder of something we were practicing. Then we'd move on to message number 2. Again we'd sing and reveal a message, usually a book or picture from Second Step. Here are some pictures of our messages.
Later on at this school, we got some training on morning messages and were encouraged to try a new model. This one was written with the kids in four steps - first the teacher would draw a picture, then we'd have the students guess what it meant. Third we would draw lines to model the words in our sentence, and last we'd write the words. This would, like the other model, change as the kids grew and learned more, but would follow a predictable pattern. This encouraged practice of sentence segmentation and one-to-one correspondence. This wasn't my favorite model, but I did like how we could "read" the blanks even without the written words.
This past year, we used a pre-written message similar to what I used at the beginning, but we focused more on the words. For example, we would say "good morning friends" every day for a while, then change it to "hello friends". I'd point to each word and note how the number of words didn't match. This worked with the group we had, because some were able to understand this concept and predict which greeting would fit. The next sentence would name the day of the week, and then there would be a note about something happening, and end with "we will have a __ day. Love, your teachers." The use of this pattern helped the kids to read the message out loud and gave them a lot of confidence.
Now that we're moving into a new school year and I'll be working with a new staff, I'm wondering which we'll use. The gen ed coordinator said we could use whichever model we prefer, so I'll have to talk with my coteachers and see what they think, but I think the secret message is my favorite. What kind of morning message do you use?
Comments
Post a Comment