Morning meeting is one of my favorite parts of our day! I love that it is so structured, consistent and it gets us started on the right track. When I switched over to teaching more severe students, I was worried that I wasn't going to be able to incorporate a lot into my morning meetings. In the past, we had a large hands-on calendar binder that the students used to follow along with me. When I whipped out those bad boys this year, I was like "whoa, this is not going to work" that binder may have worked for me in the past, but with this new group of kiddos I needed to cut it down. I had to totally re-structure my morning meeting and I am so pleased with the outcome! Here is our morning meeting schedule:
Student Check-In
When my students arrive in the morning, they unpack their things, and do some type of name work whether that be matching the letter in their name, typing their name on their label-makers, or practice writing it on the lines (if you'd like to see more on how I differentiate name writing, visit my instagram page! I did a post and videos of our name activities). Once those are turned in, the students "check-in" on my interactive white board. They drag their name to "here". Then they have 10 minutes of free sensory play. Why do I start their day out with sensory play? I have found that it makes transition for my students easier, and it also takes some students longer than others to complete activities. I set the timer, and when the timer beeps the students will sit down at our group table and our morning meeting begins. I pull up the "check-in" board and we talk about who is here and who is not here. We count the students in each category, we find the numbers (given a choice of 2) and then hang them on the board. We also use this time to say good morning and I like to use their AAC devices to ask them yes/no questions about students that are present or absent.
Morning Check-In on our Interactive Whiteboard
Here/ Not Here
Interactive Calendar
After we have decided how many students are at school, we go on to our interactive calendar. I use the boardmaker studio program to make my interactive calendar. Students will come up to the board and we will "cross off" the days that we have been at school. Once we complete that, we talk about any special days that month, which special we will have that day (art, music, gym, technology). Then we find what day it is on our interactive calendar. After we find the day, we sing our days of the week song and use sign language. One of my students is highly motivated by music, so we use this to keep him actively engaged. My students are starting to pick up on the signs, and it's amazing to see them "singing" along!
Interactive Calendar Template
(Boardmaker Studio)
Weather Check
After calendar, we check the temperature. I move the arrow for my older students to see on the temperature gage if the weather is hot, warm, cool, or cold. We discuss this orally and then we have a friend check the weather by looking out our window. The friend will tell us what the weather is like, and then we dress Joey for the day! I use a file folder system to store all of Joey's pieces and use my choice board to give selections to the students. Once Joey is dressed, we move on to a more hands-on calendar.
Temperature Guide and Joey the Weather Guy from Unique Learning System
Choice Board
Simple Hands-On Calendar
I re-invented my calendar from my larger calendar book set, to a more simplified version. In our simple version, we are working on finding the day, month, weather, and temperature. I have been slowing adding more skills to this calendar, and this is where we are currently but we still have "yesterday was" and "tomorrow will be" to add. I think this will be a hard topic for my students. When using this simple calendar, I give my students a choice of 2 using our choice board. We love the choice board!
I put my calendar in a 2" inch binder for ease of use
Last year, I used the more advanced version of this calendar book for my learners. Here are some picks below of how I set that one up and the link to the resource. I have recently updated this version to have better fonts, graphics and a cleaner looking design. I also added American Sign Language options for teachers using ASL to teach days of the week. Each student had one of these calendar books to follow along!
Music
After we complete the calendar, I use youtube to project videos of various songs. We sing more days of the week songs to work on sign language. We also sing a song called "one little finger" every day. My hope was to get the students involved in doing the hand motions to the song. At first it was a lot of hand over hand, but now the students are catching on and participating in the hand motions. We also will sing songs that have to do with our core-vocabulary words.
Adapted Books
After we have completed all of the music activities I introduce our daily adapted book. I am really focusing hard on using adapted books that are related to the science and social studies content I am currently instructing. This has pushed me to create some of my own supplemental adapted books and to think outside the box. When reading the books, I use my choice board to display picture options to students about the books. We will use AAC devices to answer questions about the books. After we have read the story, we have reached about our 30 minute maximum. My students are antsy, need restroom breaks, and some even transition to gen ed. If you are interested in more themed adapted books, check out my instagram page. I share videos of our monthly adapted books. Look for them in my highlighted stories.
This is how morning meeting looks in our classroom! How do you do morning meeting?
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