The Most Valuable Part of the School Day: The Morning Meeting

Our guest blogger today is Carol from Teachers Are Terrific. She’s sharing her thoughts on why the morning meeting is the most valuable part of the school day and her ideas on how to implement it in your classroom.

If you are like me at all, you might be thinking about August already. Isn’t it fun to have new, fresh faces coming to us, to join together in a brand new school year?! After many, many years of seeing those new groups coming, I can tell you that the one thing that brought us together quickly and proved over and over to be the heart of our classroom was one small thing: the morning meeting.

The Morning Meeting

When I taught a regular self-contained third grade classroom, we always had a morning meeting–even on the first day of school! Starting the day with this community time is what will get you and your students through your year together, and these few minutes every morning is the best time to convene, catch up with one another, and embrace one another.

There are so many ways to do this! Some key things to remember will get you started with your own version of a morning meeting time.

A space for your morning meeting is important and easy. You probably already have a space where you gather to read aloud or have a mini-lesson. It is essential to have a designated space. When you gather your students together, it lends importance to the meeting. The space shows that the meeting has value. I had a friend that allowed her students to sit at their desks during morning meeting. The kids worked on their morning work, read, or drew while the meeting was held. To me this lessens the impact of the special time together. I always had my kids come to our carpet. I sat on a little low stool so that I was among the students. I also think that’s important. The whole attitude of the meeting is casual, and being almost on the floor with the kids made us feel like family.

I always started the meeting by greeting everyone. Make eye contact. Notice a new haircut, a new pair of shoes, or a cute bow. Have the kids turn to a friend and say hello, high five, shake hands, whatever works for you. Then begin with your message time. I used my easel for our morning meeting routine. The message that I wrote on my easel started us off officially. I always wrote something short like a brainteaser, a sentence with writer’s craft in it, a sentence to make us think, or a quote to talk about. My favorite activity was a fun sentence to work on homophones. I would write a sentence like this one: “The refuse on the side of the road was a mess for my brother to refuse to clean up.” I would ask for volunteers to try to read the sentence to us and pronounce the word “refuse” correctly as it is used. We had a great time with this, and later we would add some writing to our Writer’s Notebooks using homophones. See how cleverly I opened our meeting time with a super quick little lesson?

After the greeting and opening message, I would move on to a sharing from myself. A magazine photo, a picture book, a cartoon, something I learned the day before–anything to share. My students especially loved to hear stories about my two children or my cats. This goes back to something I already said: It’s about community and letting students see a personal side of yourself. This was a big part of our morning meeting.

Next, it’s talk time for the students. We called it Share Time. Share Time is crucial for your morning meeting! In my classroom four to five students would share each day. There were some rules about sharing. It was optional. It could be a story or something brought in for us to see. A reasonable amount of time was given to each student. From the very beginning, you must establish some audience guidelines, as well. Attentiveness is required, comments or questions can be spoken. I rarely had to enforce these rules after we got going with our morning meetings. Lead by example! I always made eye contact with students that shared. I asked thoughtful questions and showed a genuine interest. I listened!

Of course, you will have students that want to share every day! To make the share time fair, we had assigned days. Each student knew what day was his or hers, and this way students could prepare ahead of time, if need be. But what if a student had an emergency to share? One day I had a student who was in a car accident on the way to school. Of course, he needed to share that! So, we added an emergency share rule. What kinds of things did we share? I had a student bring in duck calls her grandfather had made and proceeded to demonstrate how they worked. Yes, you could hear this all the way down the hall! Then I had a student tell us he had six toes on one foot. Yes, we asked to see! He removed his shoes and socks to prove it. One day I had a student tell us about the argument his parents had the night before and that his father left saying he was never going to come back. Share time, for me, is the most important part of the morning meeting.

Here’s why I feel so strongly about this: Nothing brings a group together faster or most genuinely than crying together, hugging a friend whose dad said he was never coming back, or laughing because a duck call sounds like a bodily function noise. Want to bring your kids together? Let them talk. You learn about each other this way. You see life from another point of view. You find out you like each other. Kids begin to feel like your classroom is their safe place, their place to trust and love. That is why they will open up and talk, and for some of them, our classroom may be the only place they can do this.

If you are not convinced yet, then I need to tell you one more story. My students knew that if they had an emergency story when it was not their share day, they could ask to be added to the share list. However, I asked them to tell me a little about their emergency first. This gave me a chance to decide if the story was a true emergency or not. One morning a boy came to me as all the students were arriving. He told me he had an emergency to share. He said, “Today while I am at school….” and then he began to tremble, and tears welled up in his eyes and streamed down his face. But he continued, “My dog is going to be put to sleep.” Then, he laid his head on my shoulder and wept. I added his name to the share list. Moments later he stood before his friends, still with red eyes, and I put my hand on his back, and he told them. We all cried, every one of us. The children touched and hugged him and let him know how sorry they were. They knew, you see, all about this dog, because the boy had shared stories with us all year. This dog and this boy were our family, and he needed to tell us.

If you don’t have morning meetings, you really need to consider it. It’s a powerful community-building time. It was always my favorite part of the day. Thank you for letting me share this with you.

I am Carol Da

vis from Teachers are Terrific, and I have been teaching for a really long time–a little over 30 years. I taught third grade for 17 of those years. For the last two years, I have been the STEM teacher at my school, seeing all the students in grades three to five each week. I spend my days experimenting, designing, building, and solving problems. It’s truly amazing! There are many things I miss about the regular classroom since my switch to STEM. Reading books to students is tops on that list. The morning meeting and the community I shared with so many boys and girls is also on that list.