Category Archives: Morning Messages
PB Technology
Here is a look at some of the activities we’ve used our Promethean Board for this week:
This is a writing mini-lesson we did on “Things We Can Write About”. This chart came with our new Writer’s Workshop resource.
During this Morning Message, we sequenced the animals in Brown Bear. The kiddos had to drag the animals from the bottom (where the white space is) up to boxes that were numbered 1-9.
In this Morning Message, the kids helped me to list all the animals in Brown Bear. I did all the writing (because it was the 13th day of school!).
This was the morning message where I introduced our first sight words. The children drug the words down into the sentences where we decided they made the most sense. 🙂
Morning Message Promethean Style
Here’s a look at our first morning message of the year on the Promethean Board:
Any ideas out there for beginning of year morning messages?
Another Morning Message
Please tell me if you’re getting tired of seeing my Morning Message posts! 🙂 I’m trying to post them so you can get ideas and also so I don’t forget what I can use next year! 🙂
I introduced simple Sudoku puzzles this week and I put an easy one in the MM to see if the kiddos were picking up on it:
We also worked with some measurement and punctuation.
Kristen 🙂
A “new” way to Morning Message!
I found this great idea to change up my Morning Message a bit. I wanted to make it more engaging and since we’d been doing the same tasks for awhile now, I thought I needed to find something new. I came across it on Pintrest and then found this blog (Growing Kinders) that had some great ideas for changing it up! I liked the ideas and wanted to make sure everyone had a chance “to do” something, so I changed a few things and ended up with this:
and this:
This could be done as the children come in each day, but I like to do this as a shared activity so that I can observe who is having trouble with what skills. The kids REALLY like it and are having fun with each of the tasks I ask them to do each day.
So far, we’ve worked on these skills:
punctuation
addition
subtraction
word families
sight words
fill in the missing words
patterns (letter and shape patterns)
As I shared in a previous post, I have pictures of the children’s faces on large popscicle sticks and have written their names on them as well. I choose one student each day to be the “stick person”. They pick two names at a time and those children come up and fill in something on our Morning Message, when they sit back down, two more are chosen.
Let me know if you think of anymore skills we could practice! I have a few new ones coming up this week, and I’ll be sharing those soon!
Kristen 🙂
Sticks
This is how I choose names so that everyone gets a chance to find something in our Morning Messages (and whenever else they are needed). I take each child’s picture on the 1st day of school, laminate it, and then punch them out with one of my Stampin’ Up! circle punches. I tape them on to jumbo popsicle sticks from Discount School Supply and write the child’s name sideways with a permanent marker.
At this time in the year, I choose one child each day to be the stick-picker. They get to call out the child’s name who will come to the board next. This is great for even my non-readers because they can identify everyone just by their picture. I keep them in a plastic cup next to my bench.
Kristen 🙂
Meaningful morning messages
I’ve decided that this is the year I want to work on making my morning messages more meaningful each day. I’ve been working different skills into my morning messages so that it helps me and the children focus in on what our target skill will be for that day/week. This week, we have been focusing on rhyming words.
The children love coming up with words that rhyme with our sight words and try to guess what the word will be that I pick to rhyme with on that day.
Kristen 🙂
Morning Message
I’ve been trying some new things with our Morning Message, leaving out parts of words, not including initial consonants, talking up the sight words, etc. Here are some pictures of a few of our recent ones:
Kristen's Kindergarten 