Have you ever heard an accessible (special) education teacher say that morning meeting is their favorite time of the day? I used to think those people were absolutely crazy.
Morning meeting looked a lot like this my first few years of teaching- me repeating directions 20 times while kids ran away and trying to talk over behaviors of the kids who didn't want to be there. Does that sound like your morning meeting, too?
It took me a while to get into my groove with morning meeting, and now I see it as one of the most valuable times of my day. I can pack in so much learning, and really functional learning, into one 30 minute block. What I actually think is the most important part of morning meeting, is the way it builds students' ability to sit and attend to instruction. If they can do that, SO many more environments become meaningful learning opportunities. I can think of how conquering morning meeting has helped some of my students be able to be successful in library, art class, even the cafeteria. It is such a valuable time of the day, and I cringe thinking about how I didn't take advantage of that when I first started teaching.
Morning meeting became less of a disaster when I started taking the use of visuals more seriously. The game changer for me was actually teaching the use of the visuals and getting students bought into the idea that the visuals were valuable and helped them. This didn't just happen on its own! It took time, and I had to start slowly to get buy-in from the students. You'll notice as I go through how I run morning meeting, visuals anchor everything we do. I incorporate them so much for a few reasons:
- Visuals help increase independence and decrease the need for an adult to prompt a response
- They give more communication opportunities, especially for non-speaking students
- It aligns to the learning style for hands-on students
- Visuals help reinforce language, especially for students with language delays
This is what my current morning meeting set-up is. Every year it changes slightly based off of the need of my learners. I've even in the past done 2 morning meetings if the discrepancies between my students is really large or if I have a lot of 4th graders and a lot of K-1 students. What's nice about this structure is that I can customize the meeting to fit our students needs using the same format and visuals no matter what.
Hello Dance
We always start off our morning meeting with a hello dance. It is an engaging way to get students to the carpet and interested in the meeting. I try to keep the song consistent so that students can build up to the skills they need to successfully participate in the song. I purposefully have picked a video that uses simple motor movements and promotes imitation skills. Almost all of my students have some sort of imitation skill- using t
his video at the start of morning meeting helps reinforce the idea of imitating behavior or others.
Hello
Next we say hello to each other. Each of the students uses their voice or AAC or a gesture to greet the peers sitting next to them. I also have them choose how they would like me to greet them using a visual choice board. What I choses for the greetings is actually super intentional. I make sure that the choices are all age appropriate (I'm K-4) and that there is at least 1 choice that doesn't involve touching for the students who are uncomfortable with that. There are some more creative ways to be greeted, I'm sure I haven't thought of everything, but these are the options that my students are most likely to perform outside of morning meeting so I believe it is important for them to learn them.
Calendar
This takes up the most amount of time, and could be the most complicated part of the morning meeting if it weren't for the use of visuals. I have individual calendar books for everyone that include:
- Today is ____
- Yesterday was ____
- Tomorrow will be ____
- The month is ____
- The date is ____
- The year is ___
The file that I used to make the books was a powerpoint presentation that I use every morning as a companion with the books. I set up the presentation right before morning meeting - which is super easy because I keep all the extra icons copied to the side of each slide to drag and drop every morning. When it is time to do our calendar books, I project the presentation and it goes along with the books to provide extra support and scaffolding to the students. The two main ways it provides support is 1. color coding and 2. identical matching.
You might be asking, but doesn't this mean that the students aren't learning anything? I would challenge you to really think about all the tasks required to do this and tell me if it is learning or not. We're asking students to:
- Matching
- Discriminate directions
- Know how to move through the books correctly
- Orient to the instructor
- Discriminate between icons
- Executive functioning skill of self-monitoring
Those are all skills I would love all my students to be able to demonstrate fluently every day and in every activity! Using a predictable format that is at a "just right" level for the students will help accomplish this.
We go through the days, we talk about the month, we count the numbers on our calendar to find out the date, we identify the year, and then we say the whole date. Students participate in this portion in whatever way is best for them- some students verbally repeat after me or read what I point to, other students point along with me silently, others use their AAC to tell me what the date is.
Extra Helpful Tips
The biggest tip I have for running a smooth morning meeting, especially this part of the morning meeting, is to make sure your staff is on the same page as you for teaching expectations. Namely, make sure you are teaching, modeling, and coaching your staff to do as much non-verbal prompting as possible! Our goal for our students with morning meeting is to gain independence. This becomes impossible if students get used to an adult always giving them verbal directions over their shoulder. It is also super distracting for the students, especially students with auditory processing disorders. Pointing, gestures, and using visual models should be the ONLY way staff is prompting students through the meeting time.
Another tip is to keep things super consistent. Everything from your language, to the order you do things in, to the kinds of visuals you use count. If you are constantly changing things, your students won't be able to use the predictability to help them become more independent and acquire new skills- they will be too focused on figuring out the new directions, the new morning song, the new order you're asking them to do things in, etc.
The last tip is to start small. If you're looking at these first few sections and thinking, my students barely sit for 5 minutes this is WAY too much- you might be right! But it can totally be taught and reinforced! Start with just the really engaging song and the hello. Slowly build up to more and more sections of your meeting as students become independent and successful. If you start out with a 30 minute plan to sit and acquire new information, you are setting yourself and your students up for failure. Make the first few things you do in morning meeting super engaging and fun for the students, and build up to the more academic tasks later.
If you give these tips a try, I'd love to hear how it goes! Part 2 and more tips are coming soon. If you'd like to try these morning meeting books and presentation, you can find it
here!
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