Class Meeting Routines

Do you and your students have a morning meeting? This is such a great time to connect with your students and for them to learn basic calendar, math, and other skills.

In my class, we do our class meeting after lunch. That's when the majority of my students are back with me... so we wait until the end of the day. In the past, I wasn't feeling "calendar time" and often skipped it. Now that I have added in some new skills and tasks, this is a fun and engaging time for all of us. Let me show you what our Class Meeting looks like...

First up, we read our daily message. Everyday the message varies. This is a great way to remind the students about schedule changes or fun things coming up. But we always write the date two ways. Sometimes I add in a skill, like circle all the capitals or vowels. Sometimes it's a task like write your phone number.

Next, we do our basic calendar skills.  I hand out those little wooden stars that read Today is, Tomorrow will be, and Yesterday was. We find the day on the calendar and go through each star. The students place the star stick into the correct envelope and find the day to attach to our signs with velcro. These signs are available in my Simple Black & White Classroom Decor pack. 

For those of you that are curious, I actually made my own pockets on my calendar. I used old school transparencies and actually sewed them onto the calendar for pockets. I can't handle velcro and the numbers being all wonky. =)

Then we count how many days we have come to school. We write the number on a small white board and then change our hundreds straw chart.

We answer our question of the day. These are two pizza pans covered with wrapping paper and ribbon. I used magnetic paper and printed out all of our names onto magnets to make it easy to respond yes or no to the question. (Next year I need to make the magnets way smaller!)

Now we move on to our number of the day. I used the Silhouette to add this circle and title to my white board easel. I am in love with vinyl and could find 101 uses for it, that's for sure!

I pass our our Class Meeting binders and a fine tip expo marker to each student. 

We record the number of the day and we figure out the chart below. One more, one less, ten more, ten less. 

Often times we have to pull out the base ten blocks to figure out 10 more and 10 less. These are tough math skills for most of my kiddos. But it's such good practice! 

 Next, we write our number of the day in word form and expanded form. I found these calendar/math skills here. I copied them and slipped them into page protectors. When we're done, the students use a 1/4 of a wash cloth to clean off their pages. We save LOADS of paper this way.

 Last up in our books, we make the number of the day in coins. I always try and have the students show me two different ways to make that amount. Once again, not an easy skill for some of my students. If we have time we do several other skills in the back of our binder. That includes writing our address and phone number. Graphing the weather, etc.

After our binders, the students get to pull one stick from our Calendar Skill Sticks jar and answer a question. I'll blog about these tomorrow. There will be a giveaway as well! Come back tomorrow!

This is where I store most of our calendar and meeting supplies. Everything tucks in nicely between the white board on our meeting area side and on the backside I have a pocket chart with vocabulary words for our writing area. This is a Lakeshore easel that I took apart and spray painted black. I know lots of teachers out there have them, and it's actually really easy to do. 

Do you have a class meeting? What activities do you love to do during your class meeting?