Morning Meeting

Hello all! I hope you've had a wonderful week and weekend. Sorry it's been a little while since I last posted; this week was insanely busy with something after school every day and then a jam-packed weekend with the State Fair and Belvedere's Fall Harvest Festival! I ❤ Fall.

Thank you to everyone who attended Open House this past Tuesday night! And to everyone who stopped by SweetFrog for our Spirit Night on Friday! It was great to see those of you that could make it!

Anyway, I promised you a post about Morning Meeting. 

So, here goes! Morning Meeting in our classroom runs like this:

• Kids come to the carpet & sit down on their spot.
• I say good morning to everyone!
• We sing our good morning song. CLICK HERE to listen to it! When the man whistles, we get up and greet those around us with a hug, handshake or high-five.  As the words come back, we walk back to our spot and finish singing.
• Some days we will have an activity to build our sense of community. Example activities include:
•  I Have, Who Has? Game
• Hello, My Name is Joe
• We read/listen to the Morning Message, a daily letter that always follows this format:

"Dear Boys and Girls,

Today is _________. We have ________. 

Today we are going to _________ and _________. 

Love, Miss Francis."

As students get better at hearing beginning sounds and writing, I will start to leave out letters for them to fill in. For example: '_ear boys and _irls, _oday is _onday."  When students get really good at writing, we move from shared writing to mostly their writing.  _________ boys _______ girls, Today ___ __________."

• We go through the alphabet with our Alphafriends! We sing a song as we go through: A,/a/, Andy Apple, B, /b/, Benny Bear, C, /c/, Callie Cat... etc, etc.

• We highlight the letter of the day (later it will be the letter of the week) by making an anchor chart for that letter.  The purpose of an anchor chart is to anchor the teaching and learning that's happening in our room, so that students have something they can go back and refer to later.  We'll come back to these charts later in the year when we focus on a letter a week and again for a Read/Write the Room station.
• As we are previewing a letter a day, we get a foldable book for each letter.  We practice reading the new alphabet foldable book.  These are simple books full of sight words for students to keep at their desk throughout the year.  We use these books during independent reading time and can pull them out whenever we finish an assignment or activity early.
• When we've finished reading and coloring our foldable book at our desk, we come back to the carpet.
• We listen to a story!
• We sing, act out or watch one of our nursery rhymes.
• We review the old stations, make an I Can list for the new station, and then go to our stations!

As always, owl be teaching you tomorrow!