Is your schedule unusually hectic this year? Are you having trouble fitting everything in? Are there days when you didn't have time to do morning message?
Morning messages are one of those tools in my teacher's toolbox that I feel has had a major impact in my students' achievement. By incorporating so many different skills in this format I found that a skill that might be enrichment one week, may be review a few weeks later. It is motivating when students go from a "scratch your head" type of skill to "this is easy-peasy". I love the confidence building aspect of it. The continual review makes skills "stick like glue" better than other approaches that I've tried.
But, what do you do when you would swear the stars in the universe line up against you? It seems like there are so many interruption in your schedule that you can't possibly fit everything in that you need to fit in.
Set up your morning message as a writing center when you are having one of those days or weeks. By this time of the year, your students know the format.
In the picture above is an example of how you can set this up. This Earth Day morning message is a self checking center. I put the answer key in a page protector with an extra page that is colorful. Tell students they will see the colorful page until they are finished with their morning message. Then they may flip over the colorful page to the other side and see the answer key. I put a ring on the answer key and hung it up on a push pin. You could also use a command hook.
To make it extra motivating, you can add thematic props like the small globe for Earth Day and the small pot of flowers in the first picture for the plant morning message. I found the pot of flowers at Dollar Tree.
Would you like to read more about Morning Messages? Click HERE for more ideas plus there are FREEBIES on that post.
Sources to make my blog post graphics can be found HERE. Click HERE to read my blog's disclosure statement.
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