Morning Meeting Greetings

My school uses the Responsive Classroom approach to teaching and classroom management. The premise behind this approach is that children learn best when they have both academic and social-emotional skills. Therefore, the practices within the approach are designed to teach students prosocial skills that will support their academic learning.

There are ten core classroom practices at the heart of Responsive Classroom, one of which is Morning Meeting.  Morning Meeting is a time when the whole class gathers together, greets one another, shares news, and gets ready for the day.  Over the years, my Morning Meeting has looked differently depending on the time of year, my students' interests and needs, and how much time I had available.  However, we always start with a greeting to make sure that every kiddo is acknowledged and welcomed by at least one peer.

We have a lot of "standard" greetings, like passing a handshake around the circle, and as a class, we love learning new greetings and re-visiting old favorites throughout the year.  In the beginning of the year, I typically introduce two new greetings a week and we do each for 2-3 days.  Before we start, we always review the importance of being respectful by using a "strong speaker" voice, using each other's names, and making eye contact. We also talk about how the class needs to quietly track the greeting around the circle to be ready for our turn.  After the greeting, we discuss what went well and what we could do to improve for the next time.  I have found this brief reflection to be very valuable; it helps the kiddos to be accountable during the greeting and also helps me see what stood out to them as successful or challenging.

Today was our first day back after a few days off so we did the "Handstack Greeting" -- a familiar but popular greeting that encourages eye contact, strong speaker voices, and listening/looking. In order to do this greeting, two people create a hand stack (one hand on top of the other), they then lift their stacked hands above their heads and look below them to greet each other.

A few of our other popular greetings are the "Ball Roll" and "Closed-eye Greeting" (where we start with our eyes closed and open them when we hear our name across the circle).  So far this year, though, the class favorite has been the "Grown-up Greeting" (aka the "Formal Greeting").  In this greeting, instead of using first names, which is typical, the kiddos address each other as "Mr. ____" or "Miss ____."  They get the biggest kick out of using last names and it is pretty funny to hear them greet each other so formally.

I also recently discovered a new greeting known as the "Puppet Greeting," and I suspect this one will quickly climb to the top of our favorites list as well.  For this greeting, we passed around a puppet (I happened to use a ridiculous-looking orange cat I found in our storage closet).  The kiddos got to greet the puppet by shaking its hand. This greeting has potential to get quite silly so it's not one that I will pull out very often, but it's a lot of fun to do every once in awhile.

Wow, this post has gotten long, so I'll save the rest of Morning Meeting (and more about RC) for another time!