Sonja Kelly

Morning Meeting Inquiry Reflection

Part 1
Ms. G performs the routine in a very specific way. She strays away from a traditional
morning meeting steps and does greeting, sharing, morning message, and then the activity. In the
morning meeting book, it is usually used by the steps of greeting, sharing, activity, and morning
message. I am sure this is something that just works well for her class and their environment. It
might help with their time management or she wants a break between sharing and activity. Either
way the meeting went very smoothly for her. I would assume she’s always done this routine this
way since the students seem to understand the flow of it pretty well. Their developmental ages
might affect how the CT performs the routine to what she did do every day. She will probably
have a question she knows they can answer for sharing. She knows what kind of activities they
might like because of their age and knowledge. She also knows what skills they may need to
work on and this may affect what she does each morning meeting. To prepare for the morning
meeting, Ms. G calls them table by table and instructs them to sit in a circle. She also clearly lets
them know that every morning they start their day with a morning meeting. By saying this every
time it allows them to understand what is expected of them every morning meeting. She gives
them little reinforcements of the rules. For example when they move from sitting to standing she
ensures them to make sure they “stay in control” of their bodies. When they need to be in a line
for their greeting, she ensures they are in line with her and gives them praise when they do
something correct. Throughout the video she does a lot of reinforcements of what is expected of
them, just remind them if they forget. During the routine she gives the students a choice of what
greeting they want to do, which I think is good as it allows them to have some control of the
meeting. Then moving into sharing, where she gives them another option to choose from. They
can either share or tell the class how they feel. She also ensures everyone gets a turn by kindly
asking the students who did share to not hold out their hand. During the morning meeting she has
one student go up to the board and point at the sentence. Then the whole class reads the message
together. She also incorporate a little more sharing into the morning message by adding a
question in the message. Then for the activity they did a verb movement game. During all these
actions she consistently reminded the students of the rules and expectations. This really helped
students as they all reacted correctly and behaved to the way Ms. G wanted them to. Ms. G will
kindly redirect them to the situation at hand. Her routine took about 16 minutes to complete. I
think this a good amount of time for this routine to be complete because it doesn’t rush the
students but it doesn’t take up too much time.

Ms. G performing the morning meeting.

 Part 2
Our morning meeting went well. When we performed it we did greeting, sharing,
activity, and then morning message. For our greeting we did a “knock, knock” greeting where
one student goes “knock, knock” the other goes “who’s there?” and then the student says their
name in which the other students would repeat the name with a good morning (Krieke & Davis,
2015). This allowed the student to say their first and last name, as well as learn about how
knocking on a door works. Then for sharing we did an inside, outside circle, where the people in
the inside circle had a piece of paper. We instructed them that if they have a white card they will
be standing in the inside of the circle, if they don’t find a partner who is in the inside circle. Then
for activity we did a game of hot and cold. We explained the instructions to them saying that “we
will pick one student to wait in the hallway while we hide an object (Krieke & Davis, 2015). All
of you will know where it is hidden and must help the student find it who doesn’t know where it
is. You will say various words for hot or cold to them if they are close or not. Hot or warm is
close and cold or freezing is far away.” This was well accepted by the students and they were
able to follow the directions perfectly. Then at the end was our morning meeting. We instructed
our students to go to their seat and then we said our morning message. The morning message was
“ Good Morning Students! Today is Monday October 30th. Tomorrow is Halloween! Teamwork
makes the dream work! Today we learned how to communicate using teamwork. This is a very
important skill you will be using for the rest of the day. -Ms. Chalone & Ms. Kelly.” I think the
impact we had on our students was really good, during the activity everyone was laughing and
seemed like they were having fun. I think everyone enjoyed the morning meeting and hopefully
in the real classroom an activity like this will help the students get ready to learn. With these
results I would say I got my desired results. I think everyone was engaged and were able to
follow directions perfectly. I think the students were able to understand what was expected of
them and they performed correctly. I think what led to our success was having engaging
activities that were different than others we’ve done in the past. I feel like all parts of our
morning meeting allowed engagement and amusement. The developmental level didn’t really
affect anything as we were performing for our peers who are above the age of 18. I think the
grade level we were going for was about 1st grade. So in a 1st grade classroom the developmental
level of the students will differ. All students will be at different levels, so we ensured the parts of
the morning meeting were never too hard to understand. If they were they had their peers to help
them with it. One of the trouble students in the group was acting out when I was speaking my
partner Lilly responded with verbal intervention and said “we do not speak when the teacher is
speaking.” I think this represents a lot of what we did when students were acting out. I think it
was pretty effective because there weren’t much disturbances after that.

Link to the lesson plan my partner and I made:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Cz1-XN867T9ib-
hnoXUFZyGouSFr6XdclMQuucsB3OE/edit?usp=sharing

Part 3
One of the most important things I learned in this routine is how important using the
correct wording and volume of speech is. While I do think most everyone understood the
directions, I do believe I should have worded them slightly easier. Sometimes when I am
presenting in front of my peers my words get jumbled, however I think when I am with real
students this will not happen. As well the volume of speech and projecting my voice more, and
using my teacher voice better. Another thing that directly correlates to the class is the
interventions. There were two times when we needed to use interventions and my partner did one
and I did the other. One of the students was refusing to show the paper I gave her and I used a
touch interference and a verbal. I think I used the correct responses for this type of behavior. In
this class we discussed a lot about the different types of interventions and when to use them. This
knowledge then helped me decide in the moment what type of intervention to use. Like I said
before I think what didn’t go as well was using my teacher voice and projection. I think I wasn’t
in my usual teacher zone because I was with my peers rather than real students. I think it was just
hard for me to be able to break out into my teacher stance during class time where I usually am
not in that attitude. But I think I need to work on this because I will never know when I need to
break out into my teacher voice. What did go well were the interventions, the overall
performance of the routine, and the planning of the lesson. Like I said before I think the
inventions I used worked well. To move on from that the performance of the sharing, activity,
and greeting also seemed to all work out. Even though I may have needed to repeat some
directions, after the second time around students understood what was expected from them and
were able to perform what they needed to. As well I think the planning also worked out well. Me
and my partner were able to get the lesson plan done efficiently. I also really liked the activities
we chose and want to implement them into my classroom. With the course material about
morning meetings really helped and especially the morning meeting book by Roxann Kriete and
Carol Davis. All of the ideas came from that book because they had so many fun and engaging
ideas. I think it meet all the developmental needs of our students or hypothetical students. I think
it allows for easy and engaging fun that allows them to get to know each other more and still
have fun. It helped teach them patience and team work which I think is also important for
students to learn around the grades of kindergarten and 1st grade.

Part 4
Something I will continue to enact during this routine is the set-up of the students. I think
standing or sitting in the circle is a good way for them to be able to see everyone and be heard by
everyone. I also liked the way we asked them to come to the circle by their first letter of their
names. For a younger grade like kindergarten this will help them with letter identification. In the
future for this routine I would change how I gave the directions and the volume at which I spoke.
I felt as though when I spoke I was more quiet and less engaging. I didn’t have my true teacher
voice on and I need to get into the habit of using it and finding it. For directions, in the beginning
for the knock, knock greeting, I think some students were confused on what they were supposed
to say. In the future I might have it written somewhere so the students know exactly what to say
and do without getting confused. Sometimes when it is just verbal they can forget what you are
saying. All of these concepts of the morning have been talked about during class. We learned in
depth why each part of the morning meeting is important. Each allows for some type of benefit
to all students. Seeing the morning meeting in action of the one giving it, you can really see that
the meeting brings the classroom to life and gets students excited for the rest of the day. I don’t
have many questions left. In my future classroom I would love to find the time to do at least one
morning meeting a week.

Part 5
The main FEAP I demonstrated in this routine was 2a. Organizes, allocates, and manages
the resources of time, space, and attention. When planning for this morning meeting we needed
to ensure we didn’t take up too much class time, as well we wanted to make the time for the
morning meeting realistic. Most teachers do not have time for a 15-25 minute morning meeting
every morning. My partner and I both agreed that we felt like in our own classrooms we
wouldn’t be able to. That’s where we decided to make the morning meeting short and simple,
allowing for plenty of time in other areas. As well when planning the meeting we needed to
allocate for the amount of space we would need in the classroom for the students. We know
sometimes when we are all sitting on the ground in a circle it can get a little crammed so that’s
why we had our students stand. This gave each student more space to be able to move around
and turn towards their partner. As well we planned two attention grabbers that were easy and
efficient to get our students attention, allowing us to have more time with them with instructional
time.

References

Grinstead, A. (2017). Mrs. G’s First Grade Morning Meeting- Hit the Floor [YouTube Video].

In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV5k6Ft8eMI

Kriete, R., & Davis, C. (2017). The morning meeting book : K-8 (3rd ed.). Center For

Responsive Schools.