The Morning Meeting: Sharing & a FREEBIE

Welcome back friends! It is time to share a little bit more about The Morning Meeting Book and this week we will focus in on Sharing. You can read my reflections on the first part of morning meeting, Greetings, HERE. I don't know about you but when I started this chapter I was quickly thinking of all the horrors that come with SHOW AND TELL! This IS NOT that! Thank heavens.  It's all about conversation and we are SUPER conversationalists in Kindergarten!

THE SHARER:  The purpose of sharing during morning meeting is to get students to know each other a little better.  Last week we talked about the greeting (so they can learn their classmates names) and the next step would be to share.  I cringe a little thinking of the long stories that will creep in and I may never get a moment of teaching time in the day but there are solutions for that too!  The whole idea behind this sharing time is to clear, concise, and to the point. 

THE LISTENER: Even better there is a huge focus on what the LISTENER should be doing too. I've already been doing all of this at different points of the day (Writer's Workshop, sharing after Math Journals, and Reading time too). It takes a full year of reminders and mini lessons on how to be a respectful listener when we introduce this a little at a time. My goal is to use morning meeting so we know right from the start how to be a good listener.

I love that the suggestion is to do around the circle sharing first with little ones and then move into partner sharing.  The third type of sharing is dialogue sharing (when students pick their own topic) but we will need to ease our way into that one. My mind is already swimming with ideas for around the circle sharing for back to school and I am going to write them all down so I am ready for each day and won't have to plan on the run (literally....you know it's a running race the entire month of August!)  Our first unit is on families around the world so it will be a great time to share more about our families during morning meeting.

My biggest take away from the chapter was the section on generating effective questions. We REALLY struggle with this in Kindergarten because everything is about ME, ME, ME and never really about YOU. I made this poster as a reminder so students will have a visual cue to ask a question instead of me saying "Is it a question?" eight hundred thousand times next year. :) 

Grab the poster HERE. 


What were your take aways from the chapter? Have you ever implemented morning meeting before? I'd love to hear from you! You can find me on Instagram @learningwithmrslangley and on Facebook too.  Thanks for stopping by today!