Make an impact in your classroom each morning by having a morning meeting. Classroom meetings are an excellent way to spend time with your class, build relationships, and prepare for the day. Check out the morning meeting ideas in this post with ready-for-you greetings, questions for sharing, activities, games, and messages.
Morning Meeting Ideas for the K-3 Classroom
Morning meetings are a time for all class members to join and start the day. This daily check-in usually occurs in a circle. It involves saying “hello” in a greeting, sharing in a short discussion or answering a question, and participating in a quick activity. This daily warm-up helps kids and adults transition into the day from home into the classroom. The purpose is to help everyone settle in and feel ready for the day.
Morning meetings should be relatively quick and purposeful. A session can take anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes. It is essential to be flexible with the time and do what feels best for your students’ needs that day. While a morning meeting is encouraged, a class meeting can take place at any time of day and with any structure you need. An afternoon wrap-up is a valuable way for kids to transition out the door.
This post explains the importance of meetings, their components, and their components. You can follow the meeting method below or adapt it to suit your needs.
Table of Contents
- Morning Meeting Ideas for the K-3 Classroom
- What is a Morning Meeting?
- Components of Morning Meetings
- Morning Meeting Ideas and Resources
Why is a Morning Meeting Important?
There are many benefits to having a daily morning meeting in your classroom.
1. Morning meetings help kids settle into the day.
Starting the day with a meeting is an excellent way to focus on what’s ahead and create a positive atmosphere where students are ready to learn. Often, kids come with stories (good and bad) from home that may challenge them to focus once they are at school.
Morning meetings allow kids to get emotionally ready for the day, leave behind previous events, and focus on what’s happening at school.
2. Morning meetings help create classroom inclusion.
Everyone feels heard and understood When they have a voice and a chance to share openly. When they feel understood and respected, they feel like they belong. This is when an inclusive morning meeting can occur.
Spend time before the first meeting teaching expectations and emphasizing ways to show respect. Brainstorm and model what they should look, sound, and feel like, and practice it together. Record the expectations on an anchor chart and review it often.
3. Morning meetings create a sense of community and build friendship.
Through a daily meeting, the classroom environment is enhanced, relationships develop, and the community grows. Classroom meetings dramatically change the classroom climate, starting things off in a positive tone. Children connect with and learn about peers and develop social skills. Morning meetings build community when kids get to help one another and care for each other.
Ensure the morning meetings are student-centered and include time for one-on-one interactions, group sharing, and participation activities.
More Reasons to Give Meetings a Try
4. Morning meetings build social-emotional skills.
Morning meetings build many skills through social-emotional learning activities. When children have opportunities to share about themselves openly, they develop self-awareness and confidence. Spending time connecting, greeting, and learning about peers will also help students develop social skills.
Be patient when first starting morning meetings. Some kids will need time to become comfortable sharing and participating fully. Make sure to recognize those individuals and allow them time and space to relax.
A helpful strategy to encourage emotional awareness is to do a feelings check-in. Have kids note how they are feeling on a chart or with a sticky note. This exercise will help them be emotionally prepared for what’s next.
Role-playing activities are excellent ways to create empathy and practice socially acceptable responses to different scenarios. Use this activity often to teach kids about body language, facial expressions, and how their actions affect others.
5. Morning meetings provide a way to connect at the start of the day.
School is often hectic and overscheduled, and teachers frequently find it hard to fit everything in. Without a scheduled meeting, the day can quickly slip by without much time dedicated to checking in with each other to see how things are going. Morning meetings afford us a small chunk of time to meet and connect with our students before the academic demands take over.
Make classroom meetings part of your daily plan by scheduling the time and recording it in your teacher planner. Jot down what you will cover in a lesson plan, just as you would for any other academic lesson.
6. Sharing leads to learning.
Morning meetings are valuable chunks of time to learn about our students. They provide a safe space for kids to share honestly with the group.
Ask questions you wouldn’t usually think to ask during academic learning time or in our brief conversations each day. When kids share, we grow familiar with their circumstances, beliefs, joys, struggles, and opinions about school, life, and themselves.
7. Classroom meetings build conversation skills.
The structure of meetings provides opportunities to speak and listen. Speaking orally in front of a group and listening to others share ideas develop essential conversation skills.
Take time to model and practice proper “whole-body” listening. Also, teach and give examples of clear, fluent speech. Participating in daily classroom meetings will naturally build listening and speaking skills.
What is a Morning Meeting?
Morning meetings have different components that help bring the class together and connect. A popular format follows the Responsive Classroom Morning Meetings method, which has four main parts. Your morning meeting can take on its structure depending on your classroom needs and time allowance.
Necessary Elements of Any Morning Meeting
No matter what you choose to include in your morning meeting, remember the following essential elements:
- Build a morning meeting routine and keep it fresh with fun additions and activities.
- Be willing to adapt the structure of your meetings to meet the developmental needs of your students.
- Provide opportunities for all students to participate equally.
Components of Morning Meetings
Below is a description of each part of a morning meeting, how they typically run, and ideas you can try in your classroom.
Greeting
The morning meeting often begins with a greeting. Classmates greet each other briefly and in a friendly way. Each greeting brings the class members together into a circle. The greeting is a quick and engaging way for everyone to connect and foster community!
Ideas for Morning Meeting Greetings:
- Vary greetings with fresh and fun ideas
- BUTTERFLY: While saying good morning to classmates, hook thumbs together and wave your fingers, for a creative type of handshake.
- ROLL THE BALL: In a circle, greet a classmate and roll them the ball. They greet someone new and roll the ball in their direction.
- ECHO: In a circle, take turns saying, “Hello, my name is ___, and I’d like to say good morning!” in a unique way with gestures. Repeat back, “Good morning!” in the same way!
Give the morning meeting greeting a social-emotional focus with these ideas.
- THANKFUL FOR: Take turns and greet each other with “Good morning, ___!” and “Today, I am thankful for ___.”
- POSITIVE AFFIRMATIONS: In a circle, greet classmates with “Good morning!” and something you are good at. For example, “My name is Wesley, and I am a good friend!”
- GIVE A COMPLIMENT: Greet classmates by saying, “Good morning, ___!” and compliment them (You are…, I think you…, I like how…).
Sharing Questions
The meeting continues with sharing time. The teacher or meeting facilitator asks a question. Students reflect and share their thoughts and opinions openly while listening respectfully to others. Use morning meeting questions for peers to get to know each other better!
Ideas for Morning Meeting Questions on Social-Emotional Topics:
- Learn about the value of sharing time in your morning meeting.
- BRAINSTORM AND DISCUSS: What are your three favorite things to do at recess?
- WHAT WOULD YOU DO: What would you do if someone dropped their snack at recess?
- SHARE: Tell us about one of our classroom rules. Why do we follow it?
- THINK-PAIR-SHARE: Is tattling a good thing? What can we do instead?
- WHAT DO YOU THINK: What do you think when you look at yourself in the mirror each day?
Activity
The morning meeting continues with activity time. Activities are typically short, energetic exercises that get kids moving and playing as a group. They bring everyone together to play team-building games, move, act, dance, work together, and have fun!
Ideas for Morning Meeting Activities:
- Try these three fun morning meeting games by Susan Jones Teaching.
- BRAIN BREAK: Get up and find a space. Sing and do the actions for “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes.”
- FIND A FRIEND: Find a friend with whom you have something in common. Listen to the teacher for directions. For example, letters in the first name play the same sport.
- EXTREME ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS: In this rock, paper, scissors tournament, everyone starts playing with a partner. The winner of each round stays standing while others sit down. The game keeps going until the last person wins the game.
Encourage kids to participate in social-emotional learning activities:
- Practice meditation and breathing exercises.
- RESPONSIBILITY OR GROWTH MINDSET CHARADES: The teacher will start acting out how to be responsible or show a growth mindset. Kids guess until someone gets it correct. Then, it is their turn to do the acting. Remember, no talking or calling out! For example, putting dishes away, making the bed, completing a project, tying shoelaces, or hanging up the bag.
- THE COMPLIMENT GAME: Turn to the person sitting next to you and compliment them. A compliment is saying something kind about someone, like something they are good at or work hard on. Try not to compliment what they are wearing or how they look!
- ROLE PLAY: Act out a social skill given a situation.
- RANDOM ACT OF KINDNESS CHALLENGE: Today’s random act of kindness is to smile at everyone you see. Perform this act of kindness all day long. Bonus points if you continue to spread kindness in different ways!
Morning Message or Announcements
The morning meeting concludes with a message or announcement for the day. The message typically includes the important events of the day and the date. It may also include a skill that needs review or a question to encourage thinking. The message provides an open-ended way to close the meeting and proceed with the day.
Ideas for Morning Meeting Greetings
- Layout your message in letter format.
- Greet and welcome students in a fun way.
- Write the date or leave it blank for students to add.
- Include any important classroom announcements or school events that are occurring that day.
- Reinforce a skill or topic in an interactive way (i.e., fill in the blanks, riddle, math problem).
- Check out the morning message ideas that support social-emotional growth.
Morning Meeting Ideas and Resources
Free Week of Morning Meeting
Try social-emotional morning meetings in your classroom with this FREE week-long resource! It includes editable PowerPoint and PDF slides, printable cards, and instructions on how to use them.
Click the image below to grab a copy.
Social-Emotional Morning Meeting Resources
Begin a daily morning meeting or build upon your own with this 100% editable, low-prep classroom meeting resource, which targets important social-emotional learning and character education topics.
Our SEL morning meeting resources include everything you need to engage and connect with kids and make a HUGE impact in only 15 minutes a day! You will have everything you need for a morning meeting in your daily schedule all school year long!
The mind+heart Morning Meeting BUNDLE is for elementary teachers (kindergarten, first, second, and third grade) and gives you an entire YEAR’S WORTH of SEL slides for every day and every month of the school year, plus bonus resources to make implementation seamless in elementary school.
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