Ana's Blog

Morning meetings provides opportunities for students to greet, listen, and respond to each other. It helps to build a strong community within the classroom and creates trust among classmates. I introduced the class to morning meetings this week. I received a positive response from the students the first day I initiated the meeting. I planned my morning meetings for the week on a sheet of paper, in which I included a greeting and an activity.

On Monday morning, I only started with a greeting to see how the students would react. I began with the Brown Bear Meeting with a stuffed animal I brought. I modeled and gave clear instructions first before passing the stuffed animal around. The children loved Brown Bear and all of them participated in it. Two students came late and the most of them told them about the fun activity they missed. On Wednesday, my CT helped me out once again in calling them to the carpet. I chose a simple greeting because I realized that they didn't know their classmates’ names. The greeting I chose was a simple “Good morning, my name is Miss Siu. I like pandas.” This activity let me and other students know what everyone’s favorite animal was while learning their names. Right after the greeting, I introduced an activity with a beach ball I purchased at the Dollar Store. I wrote all of their sight words onto the beach ball the night before. The purpose of this activity was to practice their sight words. I threw the ball to a student lightly and whatever word is under their right thumb is the word they say out loud. The beach ball activity got out of hand since I didn’t set guidelines and rules. On Thursday, I was able to call table to come to the carpet quietly. I tried the Butterfly Greeting, but not all of them did the butterfly gesture. The greeting starts with saying “Good morning” to each other and then hooking their thumbs together and wave their fingers in the sign language sign for butterfly. I repeated the same activity with the beach ball, which they enjoyed. I set cleared rules before letting them use the beach ball this time and they obeyed this time. Friday morning I did the Brown Bear Meeting since it’s the greeting they like the most. The activity for that day was to say their names while passing the beach ball around.