Social emotional lessons through quick games? YES PLEASE!!

The Morning Meeting Activities are significant to:

increase sense of community
foster active and engaged participation
encourage inclusion and cooperation
help students learn how to/ feel comfortable with persevering through challenges
strengthens academic and social skills

The challenge of implementing daily morning meeting activities is that many of the activities require time to model, explain, and practice the activity with the class. Once this initial teaching of the game happens the students should be able to recall the rules, directions, and objectives easily. Some games are simple enough to explain and model while playing. Games that require more instruction I often teach during dismissal, recess, or as part of a brain break.

Students love to learn new games, but they also love repeating familiar games. I teacher a wealth of games the first few weeks of school so we can use them as we get our routines and expectations for morning meeting down pat. These beginning games usually focus on team building experiences. I share my top 5 favorite morning meeting activities for the first week of school here!

I usually allocate 5 minutes for an activity. If you have a lot of time to morning meeting- extend the game! The students get SO much out of it. It is amazing to watch the students way of working together and communicating evolve throughout the months. My shy students also come out of their shell a little during these games, they start to participate with low- risk games and their confidence grows from there. It is truly an amazing time. Not to mention some of the games are so fun and funny, my students and I would be hysterically laughing. Below I shared my students’ favorites in each class I have taught.

These game cards are from my Morning Meeting Activities Cards resource.

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My Students Favorite Morning Meeting Activities

5th grade: Duckie Wuckie

I really though that this morning meeting activity would be too “kiddie” for my 5th graders, but wow was I wrong! They begged for it every day and each time we played I had students laughing until they were crying. By the end of the year, my students who didn’t like to raise their hands wanted to be the one in the middle being silly. So many memories were created during this game. It helped to make our classroom a place where we could laugh and have fun when it was appropriate but the students knew how to turn it off when it was time to learn.

4th grade: Night In The Museum

This game has been a hit in every class I have used it in but one year it was their absolute FAVORITE. This game really provides opportunity for respectful disagreements, tone when speaking to others, and being fair. It is also a good strategy game that challenges students to use self- control to win. Also- it is COMPLETELY SILENT so enjoy that 🙂

4th grade: Elimination

This is one of many games that students love and they don’t even realize they are practicing math! The game also provides wonderful opportunities to talk about including others, safely touching classmates, and safely moving quickly. After learning the game, students love to run this game themselves- just choose a student to roll the dice and call out the numbers. Use 1 or 2 dice to change size of groups.

2nd grade- 1 Fish, 2 Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

TEAMWORK TEAMWORK TEAMWORK! Wow this game really put some of my students who need lots of attention, validation, and have to win to the test. This game taught them to feel accomplished by helping OTHERS win. It was beautiful. 2nd grade needed a lot of support and modeling to understand the concept of the game. My 4th and 5th graders got it quicker but 2nd grade still picked it up in about 5 minutes and LOVED it.