Well folks, it's about that time. Perhaps for some, you are already back.

The first week of school....ahhh....it's exhilarating, it's fun, it's busy....and....it's downright exhausting.  

What am I going to do without my mid-morning nap? And my mid-afternoon nap?

Hopefully, I have some ideas for you to use here to ease that transition back.

I think setting the tone with Morning Meeting is the most important part of the day.  It is the one area of the day that I have more flexibility with and it a time for students and I to connect.

In following with a Responsive Classroom approach Morning Meeting in my classroom has 4 components:

  I keep greetings very low key at first, as students are still getting to know one another and the classroom rules. 

Therefore, physical contact is limited and is gradually built up, depending on what your class can handle. This approach ensures that all participants are comfortable and progress at a pace that suits their readiness and abilities.

Using Latenode, you can automate the scheduling and progression tracking for your classes. With automated reminders and progress reports, you can efficiently monitor and adjust the physical contact levels as needed, ensuring a tailored and responsive experience for each participant. This streamlines your workflow, allowing you to focus more on the quality of your classes and less on administrative tasks.

Here are some ideas:

1. Name Game: Everyone sits in a circle. Start with your arms Criss-crossed arms to make an X across your shoulders and then uncross them and tap your thighs.  As students to repeat this motion.  Once mastered, start saying student names as you go around the circle "My name is Mrs. Pettersen, Mrs. Pettersen, Mrs. Pettersen. My name is Mrs. Pettersen and what's your name?"  The person to my right says his/her name and we repeat "His name is Justin, Justin, Justin. His name is Justin, Justin, Justin, etc.  This continues until everyone in the class has had a turn. The last person is the teacher "Her name is Sara, Sara, Sara. Her name is Sara and we're all here!"  The kinesthetic motion helps students to remember names.

2. Walk and Greet: Teachers says greets each student by walking up to each student (not in order) waving and smiling and making eye contact.  Ask students "What did you notice?" when you are done. You are looking for students to notice that you made eye contact, that you gave a friendly wave without touching and that you smiled. This exercise models for students how you expect them to greet one another for morning meeting. Tell them so.

3. Ball Roll: Roll a small ball to a student after you say good morning "Good morning, Sam."  Sam responds and I roll the ball to him. Then he rolls the ball to a student. It is important to review rules and expectations with the ball before beginning this activity.

4. Mirror, Mirror:  Greet a student with a motion and have them repeat that motion.  If you are silent, they are silent.  They then repeat the same motion to a classmate of their choice.

5. Mirror, Mirrored:  Play the same way as above, but this time the after the student mimics your motion, they make up their own motion for a classmate to follow. Greetings continue with each student making up their own greeting motions.

6. Hola!:  Greet one another in a different language. Instead of saying "Good morning, the teacher greets a student with a greeting in a different language such as "Hola, Lila". Lila then does the same with another classmate. Switch it up as the year goes on with different languages.

7. Round Robin: Model how to shake hands using the right hand and how to shake appropriately without hurting a classmate. Then do a "round robin" greet" where the teacher shakes hands with the person to the right of them, that person shakes hands with the person to the right of them and so on until everyone has been greeted.

8. Meet and Greet: Students pull a name from a hat and greet that student.

9. Guess Who: Using the info gained from the share activity below the teacher pulls a name from a hat (without letting students see the name). Give the students clues on whose name was pulled "This student likes to play soccer. She has 2 brothers and a dog."

10. Sing this song or chant it as a rhyme:  






Each student gets assigned a day (actually I assign 2-3 students per day) to share their bag and tell us about themselves.

This All About Me Paper Bag Activity is a FREEBIE in my store. You can grab it here.



During the remainder of the year, share time is a time when students can share something that they made or earned (such as an aware, trophy, etc) or an addition to their family (such as a new family member or pet).

If someone returns from a vacation, they can share their travel journal with us during Share time too.




1. Four Corners:  Designate 4 separate corners of your classroom. Choose one student volunteer to close his/her eyes. The remainder of the class will walk quietly to a corner.  The student with his/her closed chooses a corner number and any students in that corner are out and must come sit down.

2. Four Corners 2: Play the same as Four Corners except students go together to a corner based on your directions "Go to corner number 1 if you have a dog.  Go to corner number 2 if you have a cat. Go to corner number 3 if you have both a dog and a cat. Go to corner number 4 if you don't have a dog or a cat."

3. Sticky Numbers: One student is given a sticky note with a number written on it. He/She must ask her classmates questions about the number in order to guess it. Questions may be "Is it greater than 10? Is an even number?,etc?




4. Warm Winds:  Students sit in a circle. One students is the volunteer and asks a common attribute such as "A warm wind blows for anyone who likes pizza." Anyone who likes pizza must then get up and switch places with someone else. Last person standing is the next volunteer.

5. 7 Up: Played just like the traditional game. 7 people choose 7 people who are seated at a table with their heads down. Those7 people who are chosen try to guess who chose them. If guessed correctly, they can then be "it."

6. Back to School: Get to know staff in your school with these Back to School Trading Cards.  Give to staff ahead of time or place them in the mailbox. Take students on a tour and collect the cards as your tour. Kids just love collecting cards! They can learn who the staff members are, their names, and their job responsibilities at the same time!



7. Would you Rather: Kids LOVE "Would you rather?" games. You can do a few and then ask a student volunteer to do some.

8. Circle: Students sit in a circle. Send one student out of the room. Choose one student volunteer to be "it". This student makes a pattern of repeated motions. the remainder of the class copies the motions. Call the student who was sent out to come back in. This student now has to guess who is it.




I am so bad about writing morning messages.  As I'm making photocopies, catching up on who watched "The Bachelor" last night, setting out morning work, making sure I have work set for the parent volunteer I kept saying to myself "I need to write the morning message."

Well...9 times of of 10 the students were walking in and I was either

I feel like I birthed a child or completed some sort of Olympic sport: "Back to School Back Injury Backflips". 

I'll save you my medical drama but to make a long story short... apparently we have these things called SI joints and I slipped mine and the pain is right up there with childbirth (I kid you not) so setting up my classroom with a slipped out SI joint has involved: chiropractor visits, doctor appointments, physical therapy, wine (not in the classroom....at home, silly) ibuprofen, lumbar pillows, exercises, swearing, and Vicodin and not necessarily in that order.

It has also involved WWE wrestling. Yes, you read that correctly.



In order to get some work done I had to bribe convince my 10 year old it was a great idea to come to my school to help. So....watching his favorite....WWE on the big screen with fast food and milkshakes was a winner! 

Yup...parenting at it's finest right there.

Oh the things we do to get things done.....

Well...let's back up and pretend that never happened. 


So here is the entrance to my classroom from the hallway.



And this is my word wall. I'm a bit worried about fitting all the words on it but...it looks cute so....I'll worry about that later. I did have to move the banner letters down because my buddy the fire marshall..... yeaaaaa.....



At the front of the classroom, where we have our rug and our morning meeting, I have our classroom rules (based on Whole Brain teaching) and our hand signals. The hand signals are from Clutter-Free Classroom's Classroom Management Bundle which is amazing! If you don't already own it, I highly recommend it for new and veteran teachers alike.



I love, love, love these Alphabet Photo Cards from Adventures in Kindergarten that I use every year for my alphabet.  Since we use Fundations in my district, I love the authentic photos that correlate with the program but are, as I said....authentic.  I also love those Be an Expert books that are hanging from my easel (Be a Reading Expert and the other is Be a Writing Expert) by A Year of Many Firsts. She is pretty much my teacher crush so basically almost everything in my classroom (other than district curriculum and my own work, is hers).



I'm pretty spoiled to have these cubbies in my classroom which I use to have students store markers, colored pencils, and their ongoing work. Aren't those numbered labels by Ladybug's Teacher Files the cutest things ever?  They are free in her store. I used them last year too because they are too cute to resist.  I hang headphones that my students use for the iPads off the side of the shelf on Command hooks because...well honestly....because I just can't handle earbuds. They got lost, they get tangled, and don't even get me started on the earwax. I just gagged a little...



Does your school have a "bathroom policy?"  We can only send one child of each sex to the bathroom at a time so I have students sign out on a clipboard when they leave, but I'm going to keep it real here. It gets busy and sometimes I forget that I just let Jake leave to go to the bathroom when Jason asks to go. So I ask the kids to turn the boys/girls pass over before they leave the room. When they return, they flip it back to the front as it is shown here. That way, when I am across the room, I can tell at a quick glance if there is a boy or a girl in the bathroom down the hall at that moment.  The hallway poem is part of my Classroom Décor: Black and White Brights resource.







The Melonheadz kidlettes on my closet doors just crack me right up. I mean really.....how can you not look at these and not smile?  That's why they are there!  :)

The kiddos are VERY lucky to have their cubbies in the classroom and I am a stickler about them keeping their areas clean.  We do a lot of modeling about the cubbies and the space around them and what they should look like.  It is not a walk in the closet.  What if everybody did that? Sound familiar? The blue/green baskets serve as their mailboxes.  At the end of the day in a Responsive Classroom approach, students collect their mail and any completed work that they did for the day and put it in their basket, take it back to their table and place it in their folder to take home.

They follow this system that I keep posted on the SMARTboard to remind them.

It's FREE in my store if you would like to grab it here.