Morning Routines

What does your classroom morning routine look like? Do you use morning work? Start lessons right away? Lead a morning meeting? All teachers have a different routine for their morning depending on schedules, but I wanted to share about how we start our morning and how it can make the rest of your day a great one! Your first interaction with students in the morning sets the tone for the day.

First things first, how do you greet your kids in the morning?

Every morning when students walk in I address the child by their name and give them a hug or high five. You can also assign a job to a student who will also greet students right next to you. Having a “greeter” in the class will also help build student relationships and leadership skills.

We are in the classroom, now what?

As the students walk in and find their seats, I usually have music playing in the background (kids bop) and our morning greeting slide up on the board. During this time, I walk around the room and talk to the kids about how their morning is going. Once all of the kids have chosen a seat, (I let students choose where they sit in the classroom) the kids head to the carpet and we start our morning slides. I will usually lead the first slide (see below) at the beginning of the year but now our “morning leader” or “daily reporter” will lead the slides for us. We first start with our date and discuss reminders and then move into sight word practice. Sight word practice can be many different activities. Body spell, clapping out the letters, sign language, jumping jacks, are all examples of what we may do to practice our words in the morning.

After we finish our sight word practice, we move into our daily message.

This message gives students a preview of what their day will look like and gives them an outline of what they will be learning that week. After talking about our day, the student leading the slides will call on other kids to come up and lead our class’s mission statement that we created at the beginning of the year.

After our school’s mission statement and 7 habit slides we move right into our math warm up.

From there we move into our math lesson and centers.

This morning routine has worked wonders in my classroom. It sets a positive tone in the morning and gives the kids an opportunity to build relationships with their peers and build their leadership skills. I hope this type of routine will be as beneficial for your class as it has been for mine.