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Weekly Plan for Morning Messages

by Margaret Berry Wilson on February 6, 2012
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Students working on Morning Message

In addition to the other tips I shared for getting out of a Morning Meeting Message rut, I strongly recommend making a weekly plan. Instead of trying to come up with ideas for a message each and every day, try thinking about messages when you do your planning for the week. Choose a different focus for each day as a way of building in variety. Here's an example of how this might work:

Monday: Community building

Goal: Encourage students to care for each other in some particular way during the week.

Message ideas:
  1. Highlight classroom rules one at a time. Ask students to think about how a rule might apply at different times of the day: writers' workshop, lunch, recess, etc.  
  2. "Class quiz" questions in the message prompt students to think about what they know about their classmates ("Who has a new puppy?" "Whose team just won their basketball tournament?")

Tuesday: Literacy

Goal: Highlight one aspect of reading, writing, or language arts that would be useful for students to remember or use in the day ahead.

Message ideas:
  1. Ask students to predict what will happen next in the read-aloud you've been reading.
  2. Work on editing skills by embedding some mistakes in the message and letting students correct those during the meeting.
  3. Leave blanks at various places in the message, and during the meeting, have students offer adjectives, verbs, nouns, etc. to fill those in.

Wednesday: Math

Goal: Encourage students to think about math in fun and interesting ways through the message.

Message ideas:
  1. Ask students a personal question at the end of the message. For younger students this might be a question such as "Which pet would you like to have? Dog, cat, turtle, fish, or something else?" For older students, try something like: "Do you consider yourself to be more of a morning person, a mid-day person, or a night owl?" Use their answers to practice counting, comparing numbers, or representing data.  
  2. Make the message itself a math problem relevant to their work or day that they have to solve themselves. (Example: We have $25 to spend on our writing celebration. Here are some prices of possible snacks, drinks, and supplies. Be thinking of how we might spend the $25.)  
  3. Challenge the students to find an object that weighs more/less than a given amount, is taller/shorter than a given measurement, costs more than/less than a given amount, etc.

Thursday: Science or Social Studies

Goal: Encourage students to think more deeply about and make stronger connections to science or social studies concepts.

Message ideas:
  1. Prompt students to be thinking about a "big question," such as why a certain result occurred in science or how a person in history might have been feeling. Later in the day, use their thinking about that question to start your lesson.
  2. Have students make a prediction—about what might happen with a particular experiment, or to share a hypothesis: "What would happen if . . . ?"
  3. Invite students to share one fact they have discovered or found particularly interesting in a unit.

Friday: Reflecting on week/reinforcing

Goal: Help students make sense of their schoolwork and end the week feeling positive about their learning

Message ideas:
  1. Ask students to reflect on something they have done particularly well during the week, how well they've followed a class rule, or their favorite thing they learned.
  2. Reinforce by pointing out specific things you noticed that they, as a class, did well, over the course of the week.

How about some examples from you? Share an actual message or tell about a way you keep yourself inspired when writing daily messages. The inspiration you offer just might get someone out of a message rut!

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These Responsive Classroom books will help you create more effective Morning Meeting messages:
 

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"Are You in a Morning Message Rut?"

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"Scholarship Opportunity"

Submitted by Babs Freeman-Loftis on February 13, 2012.

These are great ideas, Margaret!  I recently worked with some dedicated teachers in Memphis City Schools who were excited about shared planning opportunities for morning messages.  The teachers were definitely feeling like they were in a bit of a “rut” in terms of running out of ideas for generating creative and engaging messages for students.  The teachers decided to try rotating the duty of writing the daily message.  With five teachers on the first grade team, they each took responsibility for writing one message per week – and they came up with daily themes, similar to your ideas here.   Teachers had the option of using the shared message or creating their own.  The group exchanged their ideas during their weekly PLC meetings.  Another grade level came up with the idea of doing a morning message walk - where the teachers would just walk through each others' rooms in the morning (or afternoon) to read the different messages.  It was a great way for teachers to gather new ideas and to get into their colleagues' classrooms.

Submitted by Sarah Fillion on February 14, 2012.

I love the idea of planning out the messages for the week with a theme in mind for each day!  That would also help with planning out some of the other components as well.  I used that method to keep my meetings fresh.  For example, on the literacy day, I would have my students do a Dynamic Reading of a Poem and we might use an Adjective greeting. 

A teacher I worked with would pull in "this day in history" on days she was focusing on social studies and might give a word brainteaser (example: eiln pu - line up in alphabetical order) on her literacy day to have the students thinking and interacting with the message in a variety of ways.

A group of teachers I recently worked with create their messages on Smart Boards and created a shared file that they just drop their messages into so others can pull and modify them.  Technology has made it a lot easier to share and recreate messages pretty quickly.

Submitted by Steven Chetcuti on March 2, 2012.

I applaud a plan that integrates all disciplines during the week. I would also like to suggest that we include the Arts in these activities. As we reach out to the whole child we need to remember that children respond to many stimuli and to forget the Arts may overlook an opportunity to reach the audio/kinesthetic learner.

Submitted by Marjorie Pollard on March 27, 2012.

Thank you Steven for suggesting we include the Arts during the weekly plan for Morning Messages. I teach music and have adapted the Morning Message to a Weekly Music Message in fourth and fifth grade. It is a great way to review material, prepare for new elements, and keep the transition to the music class productive. Students read the message to themselves upon entering and then complete whatever task might be directed there. Sometimes they practice reading musical notation from the board, or do math to figure out how long a composer lived, or they are directed to find a country on the world map or globe. One student reads the message out loud to the class after everyone has arrived and had time to complete the task. We then give the reader a simple one clap cheer and class begins.