Morning Meeting/Circle Time

Morning Meeting is great way to come together, talk about the day and get ready for what's ahead. I think the way we do our group really works for our class, so I thought I would share it with you!

This is the "bookpit" where we meet!

We start our meeting with Show and Share. Each child has one day that they can bring in something special to share with the class. They then take three questions from their classmates about their item.

Next we talk about the Schedule of the day. We talk about the different activities that we are going to do, where we are going to have our play time (outside or in the gym) and flow of the day.

After we talk about the schedule, we go into our daily jobs. I go through who has each job that day.

We sing our attendance song:  

                           Teacher- "Name of child," are you here?

                           Class- Yes dear teacher, he/she is here or No dear teacher, they're not here.

When the child's name is called, they come up to me to get their name tag. When we're finished, the Attendance Helper walks around the circle and collects all the cards while counting. Then we discuss how many friends came to school that day.

The Calender Helper then has to name the number date of the previous day, and decide what today is. I got this pocket calender and the numbers from LakeShore Learning. Each month has different pictures and two colors, so you can make patters on the calender. (We're going to start that in January.) The calender helper then has to name the day of the week for today, tomorrow and yesterday.

Then the Weather Helper gets their turn. They look out the window and talk about what they see, then we decide by those clues what the weather is. They make the arrow point to the weather and then color a block on the graph. (I saved all of the weather charts from last year, so when we get to the end of a month, we compare the different weathers.)

Time for the Pledge! The Flag Helper comes to the front of the circle to hold up the flag while we say the Pledge of Allegiance.

The Substitute takes over if any friends are absent or if they need some help with their job. the Line Leader leads us if we leave the classroom to play in the gym or outside.

Another plus to having a job, is that in the afternoon, they pick a song for us to sing during our mini-afternoon circle time!

After our jobs are complete, we sing our song of the week, then read our story for the day. We then talk about our letter, number and color/shape of the week, and then we start our work or playtime.

How does your circle time go? Leave a comment!

Songs of the Week

Hi there! I've been wanting to tell you about how we sing in our classroom, and now's the time!

You may have noticed that we have a "song of the week". This is usually a song that goes along with the color or shape of the week, but sometimes is just a fun silly song. What do we do with these after the week is done? Well, we put them in our song cup!

(The green is what we pull from each day, the purple is where they go until we start over.)

Every afternoon, when everyone is woken up from a rest and has a full belly from afternoon snack, we have a little mini meeting back in our book pit. We re-group, talk about our afternoon work, and just have a minute to talk. Right before we break and get to work, each child that had a morning meeting job, gets to pick a song out of the song cup. (I have also used our song cup if we are waiting for a special guest to arrive, or if we are waiting for an event to start. It keeps everyone from getting to antsy.)

In the beginning of the year, I had just songs like "Twinkle Twinkle", "The Alphabet", "5 Little Monkeys", etc. Then as we learn the songs each week, they get added to our possible song choices. The kids get so excited when they have a job in the morning, becuase they know they get to pick on of our afternoon songs too!

(All the songs that we had so far. =])

I find that my class really loves to sing and they have so much fun with it. Preschoolers are so musical, they love to dance and sing, why not try this out in your classroom? I've also seen this done with the songs written on slips of paper and put in a shoebox. Either way works, just get out there are sing!