My Kindergarten "Morning Meeting"

I absolutely love my "morning meeting" in kindergarten.  The elements of this meeting include

• a predictable, easy-to-read morning message with emphasis on sight words
• a mixed up version of this morning message (done by the student of the day and 2 friends)
• calendar skills (counting to special days as well as place value for how many days we've been in school)
• estimating skills
• riddles based on the letter of the week
• a "show and tell" time for the student of the day
• a read-aloud book (if we have time)

Here's a more detailed description of the first 4 elements along with 3 photos, since a picture is worth a thousand words.  I'll describe the "letter of the week" riddles and "student of the day" journal and "show and tell" activity in my next post.

Here's our predictable, easy-to-read morning message with emphasis on sight words, which are written in red.  The words on the larger white board are written on magnetic sentence strips, which are easy to order from Amazon.   The sentences on the smaller white board easel are just written in dry erase marker.

This is a message on the 6th day of school.  As the year goes on, I add more challenging words to our message yet it always starts with the day of the week and an alliterative adjective (Mellow Monday, Terrific Tuesday, Wonderful Wednesday, Thirsty Thursday and Friendly Friday!)
In the photo below, you can see how the student of the day and 2 friends are working together to mix up the message.  I love listening to their conversations during this time because they help each other to read the words and put them in an order that will sound funny, such as putting "to" and "to" together to make "tutu", the ballet costume.  This "mixed up message" activity happens while I am greeting the other students and sending the attendance/lunch count to the office.   When this is done, I call the students to their spots at the carpet so that we can start the morning meeting.  

 The last photo here shows our student of the day in the special chair next to the calendar.  It was taken on the 5th day of school, so there are 5 blue straws just visible on the left hand side of the photo.  When we count up to the 100th day and beyond, the students get some great daily practice in counting by 5s and 10s with the straws that represent how many days we have been in school.  We group them in 10's with rubber bands to build understanding of place value.
In the space on the lower left of the photo, you can see where we were estimating the number of dominos that I put in a small plastic jar.  On the 5th day of school, the estimates ranged from 5 to 6,000 because the kids wanted to show their peers that they knew large numbers.  The actual number of dominos is circled (9)  I use the "fairness jar" to pick 4 students to do the estimates so that we don't spend too much time on this activity. I do think that it is an exciting way for kids to build fluency with estimating and the symbolic form of the numbers they have chosen.  After I write down the estimates, they are motivated to count as a group to find out how many objects are really in the jar.