Morning Message (Just one Example!)

Morning message is one of my all-time favorite parts of the day. There are so many teachable moments that I love to take advantage of throughout the 10-ish minutes it takes us to read and complete the morning message. It's one of the primary opportunities to introduce sight words for our word wall; endings such as "ing"; phonograms and blends; concepts about print (punctuation marks, beginning/end of a sentence, 1:1 correspondence as we read each word, how many letters in one word, etc); the days of the week and months of the year (which is wonderful for practicing numbers by counting forward or backward).

BEFORE

DURING

Here is the final version of a morning message. On this particular day children had the choice to fill in missing letters from a word (I like to emphasize if the letters are beginning/ middle/ end sounds), circle a punctuation mark, or underline a sight word.

I had also been talking to the children about where it is appropriate to write capital letters (the first letter of a sentence, or the first letter of a name, for example).

A teachable moment that came about on this day in March was when a kiddo noticed that the word today "is holy smokes!!! made  up of two smaller words...look, look."








Just today I started to add "Mystery Papers" to encourage children to use surrounding words to figure out the missing word. They LOVE this!

My other favorite thing about Morning Message is how it just carries on throughout the day. I've noticed that the children tend to revisit the message several times to reread it; or they use their fastest walking feet to bring a book over and proudly announce that "I have found a.....QUESTION MARK!", which prompts another student to march on over to declare her discovery of a word that ends with -ing!