The school that I am placed in for my internship, enforce and encourage morning meetings and even afternoon meetings. They use this strategy to build a sense of community within their classrooms, and since I am in a kindergarten classroom, this community is extremely important to build. Many of these students are still learning social skills because of their age. Since morning meetings are all about sharing and communication, this is almost in line with the kindergarten curriculum and standards. My teacher structures her morning meetings a little differently than how I have learned it to be. She begins her meeting with “today is…” which is always written on the easel white board. The students are always situated in their designated squares on the rug when they begin. In the beginning of the year when my CT was still trying to get the students to learn each others names she would do name games such as the “brown bear, brown bear” activity. In this activity the class would say, for example, “Kevin, Kevin who do you see?” and Kevin would then answer “I see Tori looking at me’. It would then go on to Tori repeating the same structure: “Tori, Tori who do you see?” and so on. Since most of the students know each others names, my CT skips over this portion most of the time and goes on to an alphabet and vowel song that the students sing together. One student comes up and points to the letters as the song says the letter and says the sound it makes and an example word that makes that letter sound. When the song is finished, she will either have the students look at the word wall and go through the letters, sounds, and the words that are under each letter, or she will just move onto their focus letter for the day. After introducing the letter and the sound she will have the students repeat the sound, and as a class they come up with a list of words that start with that letter. As students come up with words they then come up and draw a visual of their word on the board. She ends morning meeting by either going straight into the daily 5 centers or going into the ELA content lesson.

I took over part of morning meeting out of spontaneity because my CT was sick and didn’t have a voice one day. The portion of the meeting that I took over was teaching the letter of the day, since the rest of it was almost student driven. From being in the classroom two days a week, I had seen my CT do this portion of her meeting many times, so I felt confident that I could reciprocate what she normally does. As I started, I introduced the letter with enthusiasm in order to gain the students attention and excitement. I ask the students what letter does “X” make? and they all began to make phoneme noise. I then made the letter sound noise so that students who didn’t know could hear it from me. Again I asked “what sound does X make again?” in order to reinforce their knowledge and to give students who didn’t know the first time a chance to practice this time. Afterwards, I posed the difficult question “what words can you think of that start with the letter X, or what words have the letter X in it?” (I gave the second option since there aren’t a lot of words that start with X that kindergarteners would know) When all of the hands shot up, I was genuinely surprised. These students really knew some good words. As each gave their example word, they would come up and draw their visual representation. The students really seem to have a sense of self-confidence when they come up with a word and get to draw it. At this age, self recognition is a big factor and when they are able to do something in front of the class they feel very special.

Although my CT’s approach to morning meeting isn’t exactly in line with how I would hold morning meeting, I can see why she implements the activities that she does. She orchestrates the meeting in a far more curriculum based way, but she still encompasses that sense of community and self-actualization within it. I think that children at this age really need that sense of initiative and industry (according to Erik Ericsson’s Psychosocial Stages of Development), and my CT’s use of repetition, songs, and student involvement encourages these qualities. However, I think that it is still important to have more social based activities that aren’t so much based on letter and sounds. These students are still learning how to be act like a human and a citizen, so I believe they still need opportunities to have a structured time for communication. Having such would allow the students to see how the teacher is modeling how to communicate and interact with another, how their voice matters, and it also will teach them social skills such as structuring their language. If I end up having a kindergarten or even first grade class when I am a teacher I think I will use what I know from my CT’s morning meeting, such as her student involvement and the songs, and sporadically incorporate them into my meetings, but also keep the meeting more in line with the traditional structure.