Whatever you call them; morning meeting games, carpet games, or small group games, you can use this time to enhance academic concepts. You can use your morning meeting time to combine teamwork and communication skills. Young students need to be able to practice their newfound vocabulary and literacy or math skills. Doing it in a fun way allows the children to play while they are practicing.
Morning Meeting Game Ideas:
- Counting
- Subitizing (math games)
- Number recognition
- Life cycles
- Sequencing (before – during – after)
- Phonics/Phonemic Awareness
- Sound recognition (I have, who has?)
- Patterns
- Storytelling
After encouraging young students to practice their language skills I realized I needed a new way to encourage a deeper level of phonemic awareness. I created a game pack that includes all the necessary standards-based components and fun-themed ideas.
Why Morning Meetings Are Important…
Morning meetings can be used as a classroom management practice. Having strategies in place for students’ learning allows children to practice their skills. When the learning environment is appropriate, students actually begin to find their productivity skills and it sets them up better in life.
Morning meeting game ideas can also be used to address students phonemic and literacy learning on a daily basis. Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds in the spoken word. A student’s ability to manipulate sounds is a good predictor of later reading success. Phonics refers to the ability to apply the knowledge of letters and their individual sounds in decoding printed words. These skills need to be explicitly taught (all the way to 3rd grade in many instances) and these fun games encourage practice without feeling like work.
Including games in morning meetings allows teachers to see which students are able to practice and assimilate their academic skills. Whether they are phonics-based or math and number sense lessons. Math is an important part of learning for children young students because it provides vital skills. Math skills help children problem-solve, measure, and develop their own spatial awareness, and teach them how to use and understand shapes and more.
Small-Group Morning Meeting Games include:
- Birds/Nests- Types of birds and upper and lowercase letters
- Cactus/Beetles-colors and lowercase letters
- Pine trees/Pinecones-upper and lowercase letters
- Mushrooms/Worms-number recognition
- Leaf/worm-shapes and colors
- Succulents/Bees-shapes
- Garden-subitizing
Print the cards, hide the animal, recite the poem and take turns looking for the animal that is hiding. Encourage students to use academic vocabulary, and descriptive words, instead of pointing to the cards. And just by adding a simple magnet to the back of your cards, you can create morning meeting games to play virtually. (FYI) You can use a hard copy of any resource or product during Distance Learning.
The best part of these games is not only are you practicing academic concepts but you are adding nature to the learning. And that’s always a win in my book! If you want to learn more about play-based learning, and how to use hands on concepts to grow your children’s knowledge you can grab the free play based planner here.
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