Happy Monday! I hope you had a great Monday! I had the day off!!!! We had the inspection on our new home today!! It went GREAT! I will share one picture with you so I don’t ruin the House Hunters episode when we are featured on the show!
I love these floors!
This is the view from our master bedroom balcony!!! I forsee lots of blogging and creating from this spot!
Alright, enough about the new house….onto what you came to read! Something useful and beneficial for your students!
I am going to start answering my most frequently answer question…”Mr. Greg, can I have a specific rundown of your day and what it looks like?”
Well, I am here to help and oblige! I am going to break this down into several posts so I don’t bore you with details! Today I am starting with my morning meeting and morning routine.
7:45-8:00 am Students arrive, put their things in their cubbies which are located in the hall. They must also read the password (sight word) to enter. They place their folders in the box which is located just inside the door. Then they get their breakfast (yes, we do breakfast in the classroom and no I do not like it.) and eat. Breakfast ends promptly at 8:00 a.m. This is the school policy but we tend to be fluid on those policies but I am a stickler for the 8:00 cut off. When the 8:00 bell rings breakfast is OVER. DONE. FINISHED. I immediately put the breakfast into the hallway and the monsters dispose of all trash. This includes everyone. Even if you arrived at 7:59. I know it’s harsh and not fair, but it keeps things consistent and keeps everyone on schedule. And we don’t spend all morning nibbling on food! (Now, you all know me well enough to know that if a monster is late, I will give them some gummies or peanuts or a little snack so they’re not starving….but I do remind them to come on time and I will remind their parents!)
Yes, THE GREAT MJ helps us with our sight words every morning!
8:00-8:10 students write in their journals. They must write their name, the date, and draw a picture. They must also write a sentence about their picture.
When they finish their journal, I check it and we have a little conference on writing skills (punctuation, capitalization, etc). If they finish before 8:10, they read in the library or from their book bags. Believe it or not, this is a motivator for my monsters They want to do a good job in their journal and finish so they can read!!! YAY! We love our books!
8:10 The cleanup music starts. This year, our clean up song is The Monster Mash. As they clean up, students come to our circle carpet (“The Monster Pit”) for our morning meeting.
On the carpet, we sit cris-cross applesauce with our hands in our lap and bubbles in our mouth. Morning meeting follows a pattern:
Greeting, sharing, activity, message.
Greeting:
Each morning we greet each other using a variety of greetings. The key to greeting is that everyone is greeted, we can hear you greeting each other and you’re looking at your friend’s eyes.
Sharing:
Monday, everyone shares 1 thing about their weekend. I ask 1 question about what each child shares. And I share about my weekend.
The rest of the week I choose 4 student’s to share. After they share, the other monsters ask
questions about what was shared. This helps us build our questioning skills. I can tell you that the quality of questions from a few months ago until now is amazing! They are asking questions to get more details, not just yes or no questions!! We also do a “thumbs up” if you’ve done the same thing as your friend shared. This eliminates copy cats!
Activity:
We do a short activity every day. There are a variety of activities we do from simple I Have Who Has games to movement games. And some days, we crank up Gangnam Style and DANCE! There are several I Have Who Has games on my freebies page!
Here is a freebie! Several of our favorite greetings and activities!
Message:
The message always follows a pattern and schedule.
It is written on chart paper and reads:
“Good morning Mr. Greg’s Little Monsters!”
“Today is (day of the week), (month, date, year)”
Today, we will….(I give them a preview of the day!)
“Love, Mr. Greg”
Early in the year, the message is written by me. Now, the monsters are writing the date and the Love, Mr. Greg closing.
We read the morning message together. The part of the message that is a preview of the day is written in two colors! The words in RED are what the monsters read (sight words, words we see daily and know, etc) and the words in BLACK are words I read.
The message also includes an interactive portion so students are engaged in the message. This also follows a schedule:
Monday: we write the letter for the week (not that focus on a letter because that’s bad! No. Bad. No. Bad.)
Tuesday-word web of words that begin with that dreaded and forbidden sound of the week.
Wednesday-Math skill
Thursday-Math Skill or sight words (locate sight words in the message and circle)
Friday-Nouns
And that concludes our morning meeting! We move immediately into our reading blog. The morning meeting starts at 8:10 and is over by 8:30-8:40.
I have used these books to help me with morning meeting!
The next question to answer today is this: “Mr. Greg, how do you everything you do?”
Well, at school, we have an extended day. We are in school for 8 hours! 7:45-3:45 so that gives me an extra hour to do a lot! We stay BUSY with very little downtime!
As far as blogging and creating and all of that fun stuff, I am very lucky to have a supportive Mister who is OK with me working on my laptop while we watch TV or hang out! This is my hobby. I love to blog and I love creating resources for my class! And I don’t sleep a lot! That helps too! I just stay busy all of the time! Who needs sleep?!
So, here is my new profile picture for Facebook and TPT! Thoughts?
And check out my newest common core aligned creation! I hope to have this creepy crawly finished tonight!
Don’t forget to enter this awesome giveaway!
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