4 Morning Meeting Activities Your Students Will LOVE

These 4 Morning Meeting activities are supposed to be useful for any teacher of any subject area. Whether you teach a special area class, like computers or gym, or you teach a specific content area or grade, my hope is that these activities can be used and adapted to your liking depending on what you want to do with your class.

Find Five can be Find Ten or Find Three too! I love using this at the beginning of the year. I break the kids into small groups and ask them to find 5 things that they each have in common that you wouldn't know by looking at them. This prevents students from saying obvious things like, "We all have brown hair," and forces them to look a little deeper. 

This is a great way to review things you've taught or activate prior knowledge also. You could have the kids find 5 questions they all have about chemistry, the topic you're about to study, or 5 things they learned about the Civil War so far. Physical education teachers might do this before a competitive game and ask kids to find 5 ways to show good sportsmanship. This activity is great during a Morning Meeting, but as you can see it can be used at different times of the day as well.

Team Art is another great one for community building. Break your class up into groups of 4-6 students. Assign each student a colored crayon/marker/colored pencil. Now that group will need to first plan and then draw a picture without exchanging markers. They will need to use teamwork to complete this challenge and talk about what they are doing.

Afterwards, you can show the drawings and ask the kids what they learned too! Did they see a lot of or very little of a certain color? Depending on the plan they had for what they would draw, what might that tell the group about how they worked together?

What Do You See? is an activity I actually dismissed when I first learned of it, but I found that my kids really enjoyed it. Ask the kids to bring something to draw with and lean on to the carpet. Personally I like dry-erase boards for this better than pencils and papers because you don't need to waste a piece of paper on this activity.

Ahead of time, have about 10 interesting items arranged on a tray. You can choose these items with a particular interest in mind (for example, if I was about to teach about dinosaurs, I might lay out a plastic T-Rex, a plastic Stegosaurus, a fossil or two, a brush for cleaning fossils, etc.) or you can pick some objects according to category (lay out a few school supplies and some foods).

Give the kids 30 to 60 seconds to look at the uncovered tray. Cover it. Then have them draw what they saw. See if the class can list all 10 objects without looking. You can talk about ways to remember the items too!

Questions & Clues is a lot like that game Headbands or whatever they call it these days. Jot a couple of content-specific words and phrases on index cards. Tape it to a student's back. Have that student stand in the middle of the circle and turn around so everyone can see the card on his/her back. Then, the student must ask 5 yes-or-no questions to the class to identify what the word is. The class can answer yes or no with a thumbs up or down. If a student is not sure, they should put their thumb to the side. This will keep everyone engaged.

I like to assign a student as a record keeper (making sure to keep track of all 5 questions being asked).

This game is tough but will help students to sharpen their questioning skills. Eventually they may start by saying "Is this a noun?" "Is it a science word?", but at first, you're going to need to teach into how to narrow down your questions. Of course, adjust as needed. You can have the guesser guess with more than 5 questions.

So those are my activities for you this week! Which one are you most excited to try? I haven't done Find Five yet this year, so I am thinking I will do that with my class ASAP.