After doing many Morning Meetings, teachers often wonder how to keep the sense of comfortable routine while also varying the meetings enough to keep students (and adults) interested and engaged. Greetings can be especially important because they set the tone for the whole meeting—and the whole day. Here are answers to questions teachers frequently ask about greetings. (The answers apply to the group activity component, too.)
It’s common for students’ enthusiasm about greetings to be high at the beginning of the year and then lessen as the year progresses. Your first step is to consider why students may be losing enthusiasm. Possibly they’ve turned a developmental corner. For example, greetings that felt safe and right for mostly seven-year-olds might be feeling too narrow for eight-year-olds, who crave sanctioned ways to vent their boisterous side. Look for greetings that fit students developmentally and you’ll likely see a revival of enthusiasm.
Or perhaps you simply need more variety in your greetings. Take a look at the week as a whole and then find ways to vary the greetings from day to day. One day, pass a greeting around the circle; another day, do a group chant as a greeting; another day, do a greeting that gets children up and moving around the room or gives them a choice of whom to greet. Next week, switch to other greetings of the same types.
Here’s a greeting that gets students up and moving while also practicing their math facts.
This next one’s fun when you want to rein in the movement a bit by keeping students in the circle rather than moving around the meeting space.
Morning Meeting is an opportunity for students to have fun, but bouncy, loud greetings can cause students to act silly and feting to take the act of greeting seriously. It helps to focus on engagement rather than entertainment or frivolity. Remember that although greetings do need to be engaging, they don’t always need to be bouncy and loud. First, it’s not your role as a teacher to entertain students. Second, the best learning comes from engagement, which can take the form of deep concentration, even fascination, as well as playfulness and laughter. So instead trying to make greetings entertaining for students, look for those that will engage them. Here are a couple to try.
Coming up with enough greetings to keep things varied and fun takes time—the one thing educators don’t have! Variety is important, but that doesn’t mean you have to change the greeting every day. It’s more important to gauge students’ interest level: If they’re enjoying a greeting—perhaps even asking for it—keep using it!
But it’s also a good idea to continue building the class’s stock so you can switch things up when you need to. One way to gather new greetings is to ask colleagues to share ones their students enjoy.
And remember that students themselves are excellent resources. When you ask for their help adapting familiar greetings or even coming up with new ones, their enthusiasm is sure to rise. Here’s a greeting devised by a fourth grader. It can be adapted for all grade levels and is especially useful early in the year when students are learning one another’s names.
Say Your Name is an example of a greeting that can be easily varied to feel new. Each student can use a different voice—soft, deep, high-pitched, spooky, etc.—which the whole class then echoes. Students can sing the refrain in rap style, add hand-clapping and thigh tapping, or clap out the number of syllables in their names. To make the greeting livelier, students can add a movement to go with their names, which the class then mimics when they repeat the name.
Here’s another greeting that’s easy to vary. A bonus: it folds in sharing for those busy days when you have less time for Morning Meeting.
Post a chart like this:
Ways to move | Ways to greet | Topics to share |
Tiptoe | Link elbows | Favorite dessert |
Skip | Handshake | How many kids in family |
Walk like a zombie | Pinky shake | Favorite book |
Swim | High five | Favorite activities |
Looking for more greeting ideas? Check out the following resources: