Starting Your Day Off on the Right Track (freebie)

Starting your day off with a positive tone is so important in a classroom.  Some of your students may not have that at home, so it is nice if you can provide that.  Last year, I began each day with a morning meeting and it was a great start to our day.  I found that our class was more connected with each other.

Morning Meetings

Before I started morning meetings, I read the book The Morning Meeting Book and it was great!

morning meeting book

I went in with the mindset that I would stick with it no matter what.  And I will be honest, there were times when I wanted to throw morning meetings out the door.  I either wasn’t in the mood or I wanted to get started with my day.  But, I held strong and stuck with it.  I truly feel it helped my class so much.  I had some big challenges in my class, but setting a positive tone really helped.

If you are not familiar with morning meetings, there are four main components- greeting, share, group activity, and morning message.

I made this little poster to remind me of the order.  My students were great, they were quick to remind me if I went out of order, ha!  You can grab this freebie below.

morning meetings schedule

DOWNLOAD MORNING MEETING FREEBIE

More Morning Meeting Resources

In time, I also purchased these books 80 Morning Meeting Ideas and 99 Activities and Greetings for greeting, share, and group activity ideas.  They were also very helpful.

Besides a positive start to the day, the other thing I love about morning meetings was the practice of social skills.  When we greeted each other, we practice eye contact.  We practiced sharing in complete sentences.  And we practiced active listening.

Partner Cards

Sometimes we do a group activity in that partners are needed, so I made up some partner cards.  These were a big hit.  They had to find their “match” to complete the group activity.  I changed them up throughout the year to incorporate some standards we were working on.

partner-cards
partner cards

Do you do morning meetings in your classroom?  What are some of your favorite activities?

3 Comments

  1. Cindy Lott says:

    Thanks for the freebies! I do Morning Meeting, and love the reminder chart!

  2. I do morning meeting, but I am looking for a way to change it. Right now we:
    Pledge
    hello song (english and spanish)
    talk about letter of the week
    go over the rules
    count the boys, count the girls, count them all
    talk about the month, the day, and if it is a school day or home day today, and tomorrow
    review the schedule
    the question of the day
    the daily message, right they they take turns writing Today is______

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