Morning Meetings are an engaging way to start each day in your classroom. They build a strong sense of community that helps foster an environment to support academic learning. They also help build strong student-to-student and student-to-teacher relationships while supporting social emotional learning.

Sample outline of a Morning Meeting (First Grade Classroom):

Greeting: Each morning students greet each other by name with a fun greeting. Have students sit in a circle on the rug. Have students greet each person next to them using the butterfly greeting shown below. Students will say “Good morning” then address each peer by name till everyone in the circle has gone including the teacher.

Sharing: Students in the class share by day of the week. Each day about 5 students go. Students have the option to share anything they find important or interesting about themselves, or things they have done, to their classmates. Classmates then have the option to raise their hands for questions and each sharer picks 3 peers to answer questions from.

Group Activity: Students then participate in a brief group activity that focuses on developing either academic or social emotional skills. Briefly explain to students they will be playing the game of four corners using the directions of North, South, East, and West. Discuss what the North, South, East, and West directions are in the classroom using a poster of a compass displayed in the classroom as shown below. Teacher will then stand in middle of room with eyes closed using a timer of 30 seconds for children to find a corner direction of the room to stand in. Teacher will call out a direction, “Everyone in the south corner sit down”, then open eyes. Close eyes again and repeat process till one child is left standing and they are the “winner”.

News & Announcements / Morning Message: The teacher will end morning meeting with any important news or announcements for the day, and or a morning message. The morning message can be used to help students focus on the work they will be doing that school day. Have all students gather back at the rug facing the smart board. Teacher will then display a morning message on the smart board. Teacher will read it aloud with a pointer stick, “Today we will be introduced to a new STEAM activity.” Then have students repeat the morning message out loud.

Click here to visit a great website to find helpful tips as an educator for Morning Meeting’s https://thecornerstoneforteachers.com/class-meetings/

Below is an educational video from Edutopia discussing the importance behind the community that Morning Meeting’s foster in a classroom.