One of the most important things we learned about and that was modeled for us that I have taken to my classroom is the importance of the Class Meeting. Both Ruth Charney in Teaching Children to Care and our fearless leader, Eileen, stressed the importance of holding regular class meetings. As with most things, I probably don’t hold them as often as I would like, but they are a common occurrence in my classroom, and the students understand the routines and expectations of a variety of meetings. For this entry, we’ll focus on the Morning Meeting.
Every morning, we have an abbreviated morning meeting. Based on my learnings in Diffily and Sassman’s book, Teaching Effective Classroom Routines and Ruth Charney’s book, Teaching Children to Care, the morning meeting should be short and contain no more than four elements. The four elements are: Greeting, Sharing, Group Activity, and News and Announcements. Students like a set routine and this provides a transition step from the outside world to our classroom community. It doesn’t take up too much instructional time and builds community and teaches students about respectful communication. I will show you how I have implemented these guidelines. Feel free to take what you like and disregard the rest!
I currently have my classroom set up in a horseshoe configuration so my morning meeting does not require any movement of furniture. The students know we have it every morning and the routine has been established that their desks are cleared and they are active participants. Before we begin the morning meeting, I check in homework, we do attendance and lunch count and wait for announcements.
Once the morning “business” is finished, we begin our meeting.
1. Greeting
We begin our day with a greeting in the “language of the week.” So far, we’ve learned Navajo, Zuni, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Greek, Portugese, and I know I’m forgetting some and I also repeat them every few months to reinforce and remind.
2. Sharing
We talk about events of the last 18 or so hours since we’ve seen each other last. Someone may have had a baseball game, the royal wedding, a baby sister was born. Not everyone shares every day, but we’ve learned to take turns.
3. Group Activity
This is the one that often falls by the wayside. We’ve played word games like “name an animal that begins with A” or math games like saying “buzz” for multiples of 3. We’ve also had a guided sharing activity – stories about pets or siblings where everyone participates, or favorite baseball teams. On Mondays, this activity is our “job swap” activity where we switch out jobs.
4. News and Announcements
We go over the agenda of the day, which I always have written on a portable whiteboard. I explain how the day is going to go, what we are going to do and when. I’ll give them sneak peeks at the day’s lessons, but they don’t get to ask any more details to build anticipation (especially in science and social studies!) If there are things I need to communicate about upcoming events or if we’re collecting money to save the rain forest or a canned food drive, this is where we handle that class and school business.
These are just how I’ve been trying to implement these guidelines. I know I need to tweak my group activity – when we first began the morning meeting we had more group activities as I built community and I know I need to revisit those. I’d love to hear any other ideas anyone has!
Stay tuned for how important class meetings are at other times of the day…
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