Building a Classroom Community: Morning Meetings

Morning meetings are a great way to build a great classroom community. I have seen morning meetings done in a classroom and was able to see much success. There are many ways to do morning meetings. I appreciated the guest speakers that came to class to talk about their success with morning meetings. One thing I really enjoyed about one of the guest speakers was something she said. It really hit me and made me want to use morning meetings in my classroom because of the truthfulness of the statement. She said something along the lines of, “Morning meetings are the only time throughout the day where 100% of your students will be successful. Other areas of the curriculum you are going to have struggling students, every area of curriculum, but morning meetings make it possible for all your students to be successful in something.” If I can have a time in my class where every student can be successful, why would I give up that opportunity.

Some may think morning meetings are a waste of precious time since there is so much to do in a day, but I think morning meetings are an addition of a way to enrich every aspect of the class, students learning, and students feeling accepted. As students feel a sense of a successful and uplifting classroom community, they will excel in every aspect of their education.

I want to create an environment where my students can feel welcome, safe, successful, and be able to express their identity. Morning meetings create and allow all of these things to happen. To implement morning meetings into my classroom, I want to create a morning meetings binder with different sections of the morning meeting in it. Within each section, I will have a variety of items. Each week, one of the classroom jobs will be to choose the morning meeting greeting and activity for each day. In the greetings section I will have games, chants, and various greetings for students to choose from to greet each other. Then I will have a section for activities with a variety of activities and games. For my share, I want to have a theme for each day of the week. On Mondays, students will tell about their weekend. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, students will let their classmates know they are awesome, special, amazing, and terrific. Thursdays will be Thankful Thursday where students will share what they are thankful for. Fridays will be Praises and Pride where students will praise one of their classmates by praising them for something they saw their classmate do previously in the week. The pride portion will be the students sharing one thing they did well during that week at school. Not at home, but at school. News and announcements will change each day based upon what is needed.

I think the share will be one of the most valuable parts of my morning meetings because this is where my students will gain a sense of identity, trust, belonging, and care. They will feel this for themselves, but also for those around them. I truly believe that if they feel these positive attributes within the classroom, they will be much more successful than if we were to spend that half hour on general instruction. Curriculum matters, but caring matters much more!