Building Community With Morning Meetings
Are you holding Morning Meetings with your students? It was a staple in my classroom! In 15-20 minutes, you can start your day building community and reinforcing social-emotional learning. In this post, I provide my Morning Meeting blueprint and provide you with ideas and activities that you can take your classroom.
Why Should I Do Morning Meetings?
Morning Meetings not only give you a daily opportunity to build your classroom community, but they also provide a structure to start your day in a predictable yet fun way. Through Morning Meetings, your students start the day together as a class, and you are able to set the tone and expectations for the day with the whole group.
This daily routine helps students settle into school and allows them the opportunity to be greeted by their peers, have a voice in their classroom, share about themselves, and make connections. Morning Meetings are also a great way to incorporate social-emotional or character education lessons into your daily curriculum (Scroll down for more ideas on how you can do that with my Character Education Curriculum!)
Character Education Curriculum Bundle
What Are the Different Parts of Morning Meetings?
1.) The Greeting
Each meeting starts with the greeting. The greeting provides an opportunity for each student to be welcomed into the community and hear their name said in a positive context. (For more on greetings, click HERE to snag the Greetings prompt cards freebie!)
2.) The Share
The second component of Morning Meetings allows students to share important information or events happening in their lives. You can decide if you want a more structured share or want to open the floor to allow students to offer up whatever is on their minds. Keep scrolling for more tips on how to structure your shares and some fun and easy share prompts!
3.) The Activity
The activity provides the perfect mid-meeting body break for your students. It’s a chance to get them moving in a fun, collaborative way. At the start of the year, you might want to focus more on getting-to-know-you activities. Click HERE to grab those. As the year goes on, you can start to incorporate some academic-based activities. Just remember to keep it lighthearted and fun.
4.) The Message
The Morning Message is the final part of every Morning Meeting. This is where you lay out your focus for the day. You can use the message to inform students about any specials or changes to the schedule that day. I also like to incorporate a joke, quote, or riddle of the day and do some calendar math during this part of my morning meetings.
In this FREE download, I include a step-by-step printable walking you through the structure of Morning Meeting.
How Do I Do Each Part of the Morning Meetings?
So now that you know the different components of Morning Meetings, here are some of my tips for how to run them in your classroom.
1.) The Greeting
Have students sit in a circle. The circle is important because it’s open, inviting, and equitable (no one is in the “front” or “back”). It also allows all the students to see each other. Depending on the energy level you want to start the day with and the tone you want to set, you can choose to do a calmer or more energized greeting. I recommend introducing a variety of greetings in the first couple weeks of school and then finding a way to rotate through them or let students choose their favorites. Around mid-year, you can introduce a whole new batch of greetings to keep things interesting. Grab my Meeting Greetings freebie for some fun greeting ideas to use with your students!
2.) The Share
I recommend starting the year with a more structured approach by providing students with a specific prompt. This can be something like a simple “Tell us about one thing you did this weekend” or a prompt aimed at getting to know each other better like the “Would You Rather” prompts in my Respect Character Education Curriculum.
Since the whole point of Morning Meetings is to help build your classroom community, daily shares are actually the perfect time to incorporate elements of character education. My Respect Character Education Curriculum is a great one to use to kick off the year. While some lessons are more in-depth, several elements would fit right into your share time.
In addition to the “Would You Rather” questions, another great option for September shares is the “Respect Scenarios.” I created these respect scenarios to allow your students to place themselves in new situations and think about ways to be respectful.
These scenarios are a great way to inspire meaningful conversations in your classroom. You can display the scenarios on your bulletin board and invite students to share their thoughts with the whole group or have them work in small groups to discuss each one.
3.) The Activity
As with the greetings, I recommend introducing a few different activities at the start of the year and then cycling through them or allowing students to pick their favorites as the year progresses. After a couple of months, add in a few new activities to keep students engaged. Remember, this is an opportunity for your students to get some of those wiggles out, so keep things fun and active. My Back-To-School Activities resource has some great ideas for start-of-the-year team-building activities!
4.) The Message
The message lets students know what they can expect to encounter on this day. As I mentioned before, I like to incorporate something fun, like a joke or riddle of the day, in each message. This is also a great opportunity to incorporate the Quote of the Week from my Character Education Curriculum. At the start of the week, you can use this time to introduce the Quote of the Week and, throughout the week’s shares, invite students to think about and share their answers to the discussion questions.
If you have class jobs, you can make the Morning Meeting Helper one of them, which allows all students to read the message aloud in front of the class. I also like to incorporate some calendar math in this part of my Morning Meetings. If you have students who need some support with reading and/or math, I recommend previewing the message and calendar with them when it’s their turn to be the Morning Meeting Helper, should you choose to go that route.
Also, feel free to also switch up the message and share parts of your meetings if that flow works better for your students.
Morning Meetings can be a great way to start your school day and build community. Do you already incorporate Morning Meetings in your daily routine? How might you change up your routine this year? If you haven’t been using Morning Meetings already, will you start?
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