morning message routine

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Home : 2004 : September : 27

morning message routine
By deb

I have a different mini-lesson for each day of the week. Since Mondays are always so busy, I write a letter to the class telling them some of the fun activities we'll be doing that week. I just read it through without a
lot of discussion. On Tuesday, we find all examples of the letter of the week,which was introduced on Monday, and circle them. On Wednesday, we circle in yellow all "power words," which are my word wall words. I also introduce a new word wall word in this message. Thursday's message has words with letters omitted, which children volunteer to fill in. These omissions reflect a lesson

we have been working on - initial/final sounds, vowel sounds, capital letters, blends, etc. On Friday, the silly teacher who is so tired after a long week's work, has many errors in the message and the word detectives in the class need to find my mistakes and correct them! Always fun for the kids to see that the teacher can make mistakes too! I find these different slants on morning message help me to "differentiate" my meeting and meet the needs of all the students, whether it be simple letter/word identification, or more complex phonetic skills for the higher level learners. Oh, after the initial read-through and message work, we always read the message again, choral reading style.