Morning Meetings De-Constructed

Happy New Year!  One of my New Year's Resolutions was to blog at least twice a week!  Well, week 1 passed with no blogging, but in my defense we haven't been in school!  We enjoyed 1 day back after break and then a snow day, ice day and cold day.  We seem to be back into the swing of things now so here I am blogging!  I thought I would start by blogging about different parts of our day in first grade.  We start every morning exactly the same, with morning meeting!  Do you do morning meetings?  Here is a screen shot from each part of our morning meeting.  It takes about 30 minutes, but it is a great way (I think) to start off every day.  It will be available for FREE in my TPT store by the end of the day for anybody with a Promethean Board :)  I will also add the other months as I make them!

1. This is up when they arrive in the morning as just a friendly reminder of what they need to do :)

2. Every morning I write them a morning message.  There is normally some sort of seasonal character in the corner telling them how many mistakes there are.  After we read the letter together, the students help me correct it with editing marks.  This is just a quick way of reinforcing writing skills.

3. How many days have we been in school?  We keep track on this hundreds chart (there will be two hundreds charts after the 100th day of school).  The students must tell me if the number is odd or even and then they choose a snowflake.  Behind each snowflake is some sort of counting skill (counting by 1's, 2's, 5's, 10's, backwards and creating number sentences).

4. My students bring over dry erase boards to morning meeting.  When we get to this slide, they have to make on their board the amount of money for days we have been in school.  They simply draw it using P for penny, Q for quarter, D for dime and N for nickel.  I walk around and when I see someone has done it correctly, they can then go drag the coins into the piggy bank.  We count it together.  After that, they write the amount in two ways.

5. Again, on their boards they draw todays number with hundreds, tens and ones.  Then I choose someone to make it on the board.  We then count it together.

6. I guess the whole purpose of morning meeting is the calendar.  We write the date and then add it to the calendar.  Students can also create a pattern in our calendar with the pictures I provide.  They then fill in the days for yesterday, today and tomorrow.  We sing the days of the week song every day and the months of the year.

7. Everyday, I have a "meteorologist" check out the weather for our weather graph.  We keep track of it here and discuss the pictograph everyday.

8. This is my favorite slide every morning.  We just started this one (before we were doing the fifty nifty United States song).  I learned all 50 states in first grade and I feel its a good time to teach it.  If they do 5 minutes of practice/day, they learn it slowly.  This will be the slide for the rest of the year.  We listen to the Animaniacs States/Capitals song and then we choose a part of the United States to label.  We simply drag the names of the state out of the hats and put them on the map.  The kids love this and its a quick and easy way to get in a little geography practice.  I think everyone should be able to name every state and capital and know where it is on the map!

9. We do 5 sight words of the week each week.  I put them in here and then each day they choose a different hat (each with an activity under them).  Some of the activities are back spelling, disco dance, stomp the word, etc.  They also write these on their white boards.

10. We do a word family of the week.  On the first day of the week, we brainstorm together words that are in this word family.  After that, they are in charge of writing as many words in this word family on their white board.  After I give them about 2 minutes, I ask for the words they wrote and we put them on the board together… this way they are writing them too!

11. We have a poem of the week each week that they keep in their poetry notebook.  We do different things with these poems.  We read them for fluency, but then they also write the sight words in them, talk about definitions of words, etc.  We spend about 4 minutes talking about and practicing the weekly poem each day.

12. My school does Answer of the Day which is a great assessment tool.  I write a different answer each day (normally something we are studying) and they have to come up with a question for that answer.  For example for this one a question would be "what is the first month of the year?"

I hope you find this helpful.  I know that it sets up a great routine in my classroom each day and provides time to practice basic skills!

Happy Thursday!

Annie