Morning Meeting fun!

I am always amazed by the fantastic classroom ideas other bloggers are sharing! Last week I read about interactive morning messages and a doubles chant for morning meeting. I have always done a morning meeting, but it keeps getting shorter and less meaningful. After reading these posts, I decided it was time to do it right, and it was amazing!

When the kids came in on Monday, I handed them a post-it and told them to read the morning message and answer the question. My question of the day was-- Can you name a vegetable? (We are studying food groups in health--I was pretty shocked by the amount of difficulty they have with it.) I didn't know exactly what to expect when I gave this direction, but what happened was amazing! Kids helped each other read the morning message.

They found the book we read about vegetables and referred back to it. They discussed spelling. It was wonderful. When I saw the answers, I was a little disappointed by the lack of variety (carrot and broccoli were the only responses), but I quickly realized that we could turn this into a mini-math lesson! Last week we learned about graphing, so I arranged the responses to make a graph and we analyzed the data.

 It gave me the opportunity to ask lots of higher order questions and expose them to lots of vocabulary words!

The doubles-chant activity was also amazing. They LOVED this little chant so much.

 We just went around the circle rolling dice. When someone got a double, we did the chant and my modified actions (we bumped our own fists for bump, air punched over our heads for pump, jumped, and sat down to do a little rump jump). I used some big foam dice so everyone could see what numbers were rolled. The best thing that happened was the kids were so hoping for doubles that they spontaneously started analyzing the numbers. If a 3 and a 4 were rolled, they commented about how those numbers were neighbors and how close it was to being a double. If a 6 and a 4 were rolled, we talked about how if only we could move one of those dots from the 6 to the 4 it would be a double--ok, that one might have been me spontaneously analyzing the numbers. They really wanted to do something to "celebrate" the neighboring numbers, so I told them I would think about it. Well, I came up with a little neighboring-number chant, so we'll try this next time:

I think I'll just have them shake hands with their neighbors while we say it. I'm hoping it will really drive home the fact that neighboring numbers are right next to each other. If you'd like to use my little chant signs, you can download them for free.

Thanks to Jennifer Elementary School Garden and Donna @ Math Coach's Corner for inspiring me! Thanks Holly @ Fourth Grade Flipper for this opportunity to share what I've been doing--when I can get my excitement out on my blog my husband doesn't have to listen and pretend to be interested!