Morning Meeting, Post #2

My third week went really well, and I was challenged on Friday to lead a morning meeting for a combined classroom of about 50 students. This was fun because I got to think about morning meetings on a bigger level and had to see what kinds of activities would work with a group that large. With Thanksgiving coming up, we based our morning meeting around thankfulness and what it means to be thankful. Due to their young age, keeping it simple was my goal so we ended up doing a modified version of an activity called "A cold wind blows", which ended up being called "The turkey trots". It is an activity where we call out things that the student might relate to, and if it does relate to them then they get up and move to a different spot in the circle. It was a nice way to see what the kids enjoyed doing and see which students were able to relate to certain things. We also included a poem for the students to keep in their poetry notebooks that they keep in the classroom. We read the poem in an echo format and the students did really well with it. Overall I really enjoyed the challenge of creating a larger morning meeting and encouraging a positive classroom community!