Morning meeting activities and ideas for kindergarten and 1st grade may look different in each classroom. I get a lot of questions on ways of running a daily morning meeting. I hope this blog post will give you a few ideas for running your daily meeting and how to incorporate the classroom calendar this school year.
Your morning meeting is the first step to setting up your day for success. It is the perfect time to come together as a class and share with each other. Morning meetings can look and sound differently, depending on the classroom. This is often the time when you complete the calendar, talk about the weather, and have some great discussions with your students.
Morning meetings typically happen within the walls of your classroom. Students will gather around the carpet area with a clear view of the interactive whiteboard. I like to have students gather in a horseshoe shape so each student can view the interactive whiteboard and there is room for students to come up to the board.
Each day, students will help complete the calendar by dragging the date in place as well as the day of the week and the weather. You can see below how these fit into the calendar boxes.
There are enough group activities to do something different every day. The very first slide will always be the calendar. This is where you add the date, the day of the week, the current weather and decide which activity you would like your students to complete. If you look below, you can see that I have added icons for the first week. When clicked, each of those icons will take you to another slide.
Students can move the boxes to graph the weather. Save this graph and revisit it during a math lesson at a later time of year. What a wonderful way to connect students to authentic learning.
During the morning meeting, you can select a number of the day and number chat. One fun way to build number sense is to play, “Guess My Number.” Students think this is a great game. Either you or a student can select a number, then invite guesses from the students. Use phrases such as, “My number is greater than ___,” or “My number is less than ___,” to help build numeracy vocabulary. Seriously, your students will LOVE it!
In addition to the hundreds chart (not pictured) you can also track the number of days in school with this digital slide.
On the morning meeting calendar, there are a variety of activity ideas you can select. These ideas are ready for you to use digitally with PowerPoint slide. You can also use these in Google Slides if you wish. If you have a day where you need to conduct virtual morning meetings, these are ready for you to use.
At the beginning of the year, you will need to scaffold your instruction to support students during this portion of the morning meeting activity. Mad Libs is a classic game that you will revisit again and again. Kindergarten and first grade students might need support when thinking of verbs, nouns, or adjectives. Short and consistent exposure to these grammar vocabulary words is an excellent way to make them permanent. As the months continue, these will become automatic for your kiddos. Remember, morning meeting activities are
Each month we have included some fun themed informational texts to the morning meeting routines. Some include a video like this one. Students can click on the apple to watch this quick video.
Photo prompts are a great way to facilitate student discussion. Encourage each student to turn and talk to their partner. As the teacher, you can move about the room and help foster accountable talk behaviors throughout the whole class. Often times, you will be in the middle of the circle and scooting from one student to the next student, so it may be a good idea to get your leggings ready!
Once students have had time to practice their oral language, then you can type a few responses if you wish. Remember, the GOLD is the discussion!
A great way to work on classroom community is during morning meetings. These character trait prompts really help students build trust and behavioral norms. This is another task that should be discussed with student partners. So your class will turn and talk first.
Another great idea for morning meeting discussions is asking students to share their opinion. Students will turn and talk to their partners. Asking students to support their opinions will serve you well once you begin asking students to write their opinion.
We also like to include a few skills-based questions into our morning meeting activities. The questions depend on the grade level, but they are meant to strengthen academic skills. Here are a few examples of the type of questions we might ask at the beginning of the year. You may want to invite students to bring a whiteboard with them so they can first respond quietly. This will give some students some much needed think time.
In the classroom, you can easily display the PowerPoint for students to see. If you are distance teaching, you could show the PowerPoint through Zoom or another similar online platform.
We know you have 7,000 things to plan, so wouldn’t it be nice to have something you don’t have to plan AND you don’t have to prep. These morning meeting activities are just so simple to add to your daily routine.
I hope I have provided a list of ideas that can help you master your classroom morning routine. But if you are short on time, you can be flexible. These different morning meeting activities can easily be adapted to be used in different ways or even as part of your end of the day routines For example, you could start your day with the calendar and weather graph. Then return to the slide deck to work on the math portion during your math period. At the day, you can return to the slide deck again to
We are super excited about these morning meeting lesson plans and hope you enjoy it, too!
Check it out here:
Here are some other digital learning ideas you may be interested in:
My teaching career allowed me to experience teaching in different classroom environments and grades. My heart belongs to early childhood education. My job is to make teaching FUN, ENGAGING, and EASIER. Welcome!
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10 Responses
This is great. Do you have this for Google Slides as well?
Hi Cassandra,
This is a PowerPoint file, so all you need to do is upload it to your Google Drive and convert it to Google Slides. It is formatted specifically for this… so you are ready to go!
I purchased this resource and was wondering if you need to be edit mode to add weather etc or can you be in presentation mode?
Hi Tina,
Yes, the items are not movable in presentation mode.
Do you offer discounts for this product?
Hey Lidia,
Great news! TpT is currently holding a sale. So head on over there today!
Hi! Are you able to purchase this by the individual months?
Yes! You sure can!
Hi there! I bought the whole year, but only have August through October. How/when do I get November?
Hi Kara!
I just updated the link. So sorry! If you redownload the file, you will find November in there. I will be added December in the next few days. So sorry again!