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!

The Pilgrims and the Wampanoag

Thanksgiving Stereotype

Thanksgiving is one my favorite holidays. Thanksgiving is typically one of the least commercialized holidays, but little guys still tend to pick up a lot of misinformation, especially about the Pilgrims and Indians, from images and stories.  I found an article from Understanding Prejudice which had some great suggestions for talking to kids about Thanksgiving at home and at school.  I also found this site which provides guidelines for teaching about Thanksgiving in culturally sensitive and historically accurate ways.  I used a lot of the suggestions from both articles to guide my instruction around the holiday this year.

In particular, I really wanted to be sure that my kiddos understood the origins of Thanksgiving.  We started by doing K-W-L (What We Know, What We Wonder, What We Learned) Chart.  Not surprisingly, the kiddos had random pieces of the story, including "We eat turkey" and "The Pilgrims had a feast."  However, they still wanted to know things like, "Who were the Pilgrims?" and "When do we celebrate Thanksgiving each year?"  We read the book Thanksgiving Is..., by Gail Gibbons to look for answers to our questions. The book begins by describing harvest festivals from around the world.  We discussed how almost all cultures celebrate the harvest by giving thanks for food and the land.  

Then we went on to discuss the relationship between the Pilgrims and the Native Americans.  For this, my fabulous first grade co-worker put together a SMART board presentation full of facts and interactive lessons about the Pilgrims' journey to America and the first Thanksgiving Feast.  She shared pictures of Native Americans from the past and today to provide perspective for the kiddos.  

Then she explained that the Pilgrims left England to pursue religious freedom but got off track on their voyage to Virginia and ended up landing at Plymouth.  The kiddos learned that the Wampanoag tribe of Massachusetts taught the Pilgrims how to harvest corn, squash, and pumpkins (but no pumpkin pie).  We also found out that at the first Thanksgiving they probably had a lot of seafood, venison, and wild geese, in addition to turkey.  We ended the lesson by doing a comparison of the First Thanksgiving and a traditional modern Thanksgiving.  I am very grateful for thoughtful and intelligent colleagues who are always up for examining new ways to teach old lessons!

Thanksgiving Teacher Appreciation

This year I wanted to do something a little special for my co-workers for Thanksgiving.  I'd seen a lot of cute Teacher Appreciation ideas on Pinterest lately, but none of them were quite what I had in mind, so I adapted a few and created my own idea.  I happened to be watching two of my favorite kiddos (the adorable children of one of my colleagues) earlier this week, and they were very eager to participate in my "secret project."

  

After I explained the idea, the kiddos helped me figure out how many treats we would need for the faculty.  They looked at our staff picture to count all the teachers and also figured out who was absent from the picture so we didn't miss anyone.  The Kindergartener was pretty amused at the idea of making one for the principal!

Then the second-grader calculated how many pages of shipping labels (10 per page) and how many Smarties (2 per treat) we would need for 50 gifts. We set up an assembly line to stick the labels on the index cards, trim and hole punch the "gift tags," tie the candies, and cut and curl the ribbon.  I think they turned out really cute and it was a wonderful way to entertain two kiddos for an hour!

Shipping labels on index cards for the tags

Tie the tag to 2 rolls of Smarties 

Made enough for our entire staff!