Morning Message and Morning Meeting in the Special Education Classroom

A popular activity each morning in an early childhood classroom is writing the morning message. For several years, I gathered all of my students on the carpet and had them help dictate while I wrote out our morning message. I finally realized that this was a waste of time for my classroom of mostly non-readers.  Once I was finished with each daily message none of my kids could re-read what I had written and it really was not meaningful at all! Plus, many of them lost focus because they did not understand what I was writing or a lot of the questioning. To solve this problem, I created an interactive morning message where students put up picture cards to symbolize important information about our day (such as month, lunch, theme, group activity). This has been SO much more meaningful and the best part is that my students are now more engaged because they each get a turn to put up a part of the morning message and the picture format is much easier for them to understand.

For each velcro blank, I have a word and visual cue. Additionally, I used color coding to further support independence. Each blank is mounted on a different color. Then, I store all of the response options in a binder on pages of corresponding colors to the blank. Students can flip to the matching color to find the response options when it is their turn to fill in the blank. 

Grab everything you need to implement this Interactive Morning Message in my TPT Store!

To further facilitate active engagement during our Morning Message, I created accompanying differentiated books and worksheets which each student can use to follow along. These can also be used for most calendar times in the classroom to facilitate student engagement.

For some students, I slipped the worksheets into dry erase sleeves to be used over and over again. Other students preferred to take home their worksheet each day so I made a stack of copies for them to use. The books work better for my students who are easily visually overwhelmed. Each page corresponds with a different blank on the message. 

These Differentiated Morning Meeting Books and Worksheets can also be found in my TPT store!

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