This is a post I’ve been thinking about for months and figured Presidents Day would be a good day to get it all done on ‘paper’.

When I first took my current kindergarten position last spring, one of the routines I knew I wanted to use again was a morning message. This year I read The Responsive Classroom and have been incorporating a lot of their community building routines into our Morning Meeting. The kids love them and have come a long way since the fall!

I had fond memories of teaching phonics and sight words through the morning message when I last taught kindergarten (2009ish). And through the power of social media, mostly Instagram, I found that you could do so much more as well!

I saw this one: 

And seeing posts inspired me to make mine more fun and include more math.  There’s definitely a balance between making it interactive and too tedious for the rest of the class to sit through.

Some days I nail it. And some days I really don’t. Teaching is definitely a practice for me. 🙂 Have you ever left too many blanks the night before and can’t make the message work with the kids the next day?

My kids always ‘graph’ their check in chart responses and this year I’ve started to use that data throughout the day instead of it just being an isolated question.

(yes, it’s true. We ski every Thursday afternoon!)

We’ve been exploring blends and digraphs. I love how they expand the kids’ reading and writing!

I’ve been finding reasons for the students to use resources around the room (i.e. the daily schedule) and they loved being able to write science!

I know I can be doing a lot more with morning message but I’m really proud of how far my kids have come and some of the small teaching moments I’ve found in them. I’ve even spied the kids referring back to them throughout the day and correcting each other as they reread it.