One of the biggest things I miss right now with this Covid-19 pandemic is our class morning meetings. Morning meetings have the power to build and strengthen our classroom communities in so many ways. So when digital meetings became the only way that we could still get together as a class family, I knew it was the morning meeting time, time spent sharing our thoughts and feelings, time spent engaging together, that I would want to continue. And I’ve come up with 16 ways that I can do just that!

1. Greeting This is an important part of a morning meeting that should and can still be continued. Students can just take time to say hello to each other by name, or you could come up with a hand signal or movement to accompany the greeting.
2. Share Time This could be a free share or responding to a discussion prompt, but it always means practicing communication skills, sharing personal thoughts, feelings, and ideas, and time spent listening, asking questions, and finding connections between peers and class members.
3. Charades If you establish a category, students can come up with the rest and act it out as the rest of the class viewing guesses.
4. Would you rather? Assign a number or hand signal to each of the options and have students show their preferences that way.
5. Dance Party Choose a favorite class song to sing and dance, or choose any tik tok or popular option. Just have fun!
6. Rock Paper Scissors If you assign the partners, this game is totally doable. And, as each pair has a winner, that student can move on to compete with the winner of another pair, and so on, until their is only one student left (the winner!).
7. Read Aloud I love this as an option, by the teacher, or by a selected student to share a story they have read at home and recommend to their class to check out sometime.
8. Directed Drawing All the students need is paper and a pencil.
9. Blind Drawing I’m sure this activity has another name, but it’s the one where the students put the paper or paper plate on their head and try to draw a _______ (fill in the blank with anything you can think of). Then share and laugh.
10. Simon Says This game is still totally possible when all of the participants can see each other (Zoom!)
11. Guess Who Choose a student to describe without giving away obvious clues and have the rest of the group guess who you are describing. You could even include some clues based on class memories from your time together in school. So sweet!
12. Inference Mysteries This can be done with items you know the students have never seen before (pictures of those items of course) or with a set of daily mysteries for the group to solve throughout the week.
13. Riddles These are always fun and require critical thinking and creativity!
14. Spotlight Student Choose a student for each meeting (different each time) and have the group ask questions for that student to answer about him/herself.
15. Wordless Picture Book Share a wordless picture book with the group and have them work together to help write the story to accompany the pictures.
16. Who Remembers? This is a listening activity. While the students are sharing their responses during share time, the teacher writes down notes and then asks the class questions about who shared that information. You could make this a game, girls against boys, students vs. teacher, etc.

No matter what you do, the effort to continue to connect with your students is still SO important. Even if you just start the meeting to allow your students to talk to each other, without a plan involved, what you do makes a difference. You can grab a pdf version of these ideas here.

•