my morning meeting (long)

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Archive : 2006 : August : 8

my morning meeting (long)
By lvteaching

This is how I did my morning meeting when I taught first grade. The first few weeks you really have to model/guide them, but after that, they completely take over.

I started the morning by sitting in the chair in
the meeting area. The kids would stay at their seats until I started singing, kids would stand up, push in chairs, and come to carpet, bringing with them their weather graphs and their "very special weather marker".

Everybody have a seat, have a seat, have a seat,
Everybody come and have a seat on the floor.
Not on the ceiling, not on the door,
Everybody come and

have a seat on the floor.

By the time we were done singing, children were in a circle on the floor. I would have moved to the floor with them. We would do a greeting to one another, using different ways every day. Then we usually did some kind of song, excercise as a group standing up. At the beginning of the year, this is a great place to sing days of the week or the months of the year (Macarana) song. Next, the student of the week would stand and go to the white board. He would read the message of the day (with help from myself and others if needed) and aswer the question, or tally up the marks children had put when they walked in. Then he would go to the calendar. He would call on students who were quiet, respectful, etc. to tell him the day of the week, the month, the number date, and the year. I would then hand him the number to put on the calendar. He would ask a student what the weather was, they'd vote on it (cloudy verses partly cloudy needs a vote) and he would fill in the large weather graph on the bulletin board. Student of the week's buddy (that was a job in my class) would fill in his weather graph. Student of the week would count the straws we had in the pockets for the days of school, add one, and write the number of the day of school on the white board. He'd sit down, and I would ask them to count by 2's, 5's, 10's whatever (again, something you need to teach at the beginning of the year, I had my hundreds chart in our morning meeting area, as well). Next I would read a picture book to them with a mini lesson leading into reader's workshop, or do an interactive writing activity to lead into writer's workshop, depending on what order I was doing them in that day.

Wow! I hope I didn't miss anything, it has been a year since I did any of that! I am in 6th now, we don't do the whole morning meeting thing! :( I miss it! Hope this helps a little!
Oh, this usually took me about 15-20 minutes...sometimes longer depending on my choice of book or writing for the day. Oh, also, towards the middle of the year, I started adding Daily Oral Language, too.