Morning Meeting - Part 2 - Greeting

I'm back for my 2nd part of my Morning Meeting series. If you missed the introduction to Morning Meeting you can find that here.

 

The first component of Morning Meeting is greeting.  Greeting is quick part, but a very important one - one you don't want to skip.  Greeting gives all students a chance to greet each other and welcome each other as we start another day together. It also gives you a chance to greet students and see how each student is feeling and what mood they might be in to start the day.  It makes every student feel important and shows that you know they are there and they exist.  Some students don't hear good morning or hello or their name until they're at school. It's important that we make kids feel important and a quick greeting, "Good morning, Susie," is a great way to do that. 

 

Greeting also teaches important social skills. I spent a lot of time at the beginning of the year practicing and modeling what a "good" greeting looked like.  We talked about how to shake hands firmly (not too firm lol).  We looked each other in the eye and we greeted students by name.  This is the most basic greeting, but one that will benefit students throughout life. 

 

Here are some of my favorite greetings that we did this year:

 

Regular, Quick Greetings -

• Handshake
• Fist bump
• High five
• Wave

Foreign Language Greeting - Students greet each other using a foreign language. For example, Buenos dias Matt,  Bonjour Cindy, etc

 

Formal Greeting - Greet students with a handshake and use their last name. For example, Good morning, Mr. Ferry or Good morning, Miss Wagner.

Silent Greeting - Students have to figure out a way to silently greet each other.

GoNoodle Greetings - My students love doing some of the different handshakes from the KooKoo Kangaroo secret handshakes video.  They love the ice cream cone, squirrel, the lumberjack one.

 

Ball Toss Greeting - Stand in a circle and have one person start with the ball.  The person tosses the ball across the circle wishing good morning to who they passed it to.  This continues until all students have had a turn. To add a challenge, we've used two or three balls.  We start with one and add in more.  When adding more, kids have to pass to the same student each time.

 

Mirror Greeting - Student completes an action (dance move, silly pose,etc) and says "Hello, my name is Jordan."  The other students mirror the action and say "Good morning Jordan."

 



Snowball Greeting - Hand each student a paper and have them write their first name on the paper.  Then, once in the Morning Meeting circle have students crumple up their paper like a snowball.  Next, they throw their "snowball" in the middle of the circle. They all grab one and that is who they greet.  Can repeat a few times.

Those are just a few ideas. There are billions out there on Pinterest, in the Morning Meeting book, and the kids come up with great ones too.  Towards the end of the year, I had each student come up with their own greeting and write it on an index card. Then, each day I picked a different card and that student got to teach us their greeting. They were very creative!

Anyone else have any greeting ideas or class favorites?



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