Morning Meeting Time

Morning Circle Time is my favorite time of the day. Ok - I don’t pick favorites but I absolutely love my routine in the morning, so I thought I would share it all with you! Here is what my morning meeting wall looks like! The hanging green dry erase pocket on the side of the bookshelf has the morning meeting schedule and description in the event I’m absent and a substitute has to come in. By mid November, the kids are pretty familiar with the schedule and won’t hesitate correcting the teacher when someone does something out of the routine (sometimes they even catch me forgetting something) but it’s good to have an emergency schedule just in case. Obviously I love these dry erase pockets since the green one is just one of three in the picture!

Name Song

To start off the morning, we sing a name song. I started with using the Play To Learn Name Song For Circle Time Packet. This is a great resource to get you started and the kids starting to identify their names and learn the names of their friends. Eventually I branched and started making up songs that related to the theme of the week.

Helping Hands

There is a lot of debate to what jobs teachers have in the classroom. I have wide variety of jobs, enough for each kid to have a job that day. I think it’s cute and a great way to increase vocabulary when the teachers use the official words like ‘electrician’ for turning off and on the lights. The teacher across the hall (an amazing veteran teacher who is a. kind enough to share her wisdom and b. humble enough to continue to learn and create) simply does one leader a day who gets to do all of the jobs for that day. Both ways work, both ways have pros and cons.

Calendar

A lot of debate around linear calendar or traditional. My best advice is do what you think is best. It’s not going to change the course of their lives and as long as you make it fun and engaging - it’s valuable. We go with traditional and I do teach the days of the week. (This might be because to my oldest never truly learned it until about 2nd grade when I had to review it with him! I’m not sure when he missed it!) But we always end with saying the full date title and then I end with “And boys and girls, THIS is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it!"

Whats the weather?

This was the first thing I was proud of as I started my career as a preschool teacher. It’s silly and simple but it made me happy. I wrote a song to talk about the weather. As the class sings it, the ‘weather man’ takes some binoculars and looks out the window to come back with the report. You can download it here!

Question of the Day

Ok this was the second thing I was super proud of during my career as a preschool teacher. Every morning the kids come in and there is a question (relating to the theme typically) and they have to answer yes or no, find their name in the bin and post on the right column. During Morning meeting, we study the graph and guess which one has more and sometimes they are equal! Then we have ‘Mr. Magic Marker’ count the names in each column to confirm that our guess is correct. Then write each number in the box on the page (which is protected by that lovely dry erase pocket). Sometimes Mr. Magic Marker writes the wrong number and the kids get a kick out of it. Half way through the year we put googlie eye stickers on him and he has become a valued member of our classroom.

Finally: Letter of the Week

Again - a lot of debate around the letter of the week. I don’t put much of an emphasis on the letter but I like to have one a week to be sure that the kids are at the minimum exposed to all the letters of the alphabet. Each day we have a new card we put on the letter of the week poster and we look for that letter around our classroom.

This is life in my lane, I hope it helps you navigate yours!

- Christy Smith