Sometime in June, I read an article by Lisa Walton (educators with 20 years of experience) on the Edutopia website about starting the school day with morning messages for students. Thanks to this, we will help them switch from home to school mode. In my opinion, these messages will be extremely helpful in remote and hybrid learning, especially when working with young learners.
Morning Message is a daily message from the teacher sent to students or shown in a visible place as they enter class. You can write it on graph paper or display it on the whiteboard, and share it remotely via an online meeting platform, presentation tool or virtual whiteboard.
The morning message welcomes children to school and helps strengthen their academic skills – it can be used to reflect on knowledge they already have, revise last lesson, etc. Creating interactive messages each day may seem laborious, but it is not too difficult. You can prepare a weekly topic schedule and repeat the same types of messages each week to streamline the process:
Monday – math
- a math problem to be solved by every student, for example adding, dividing or simplifying fractions,
- a complex, multi-step word problem that students and students are working on together.
Tuesday – open questions
- Tell me about a situation where you learned to do something difficult.
- What does a good friend do?
Wednesday – what do you prefer, what would you prefer
- Would you prefer to have a unicorn or an animal dinosaur?
- Do you prefer fighting a polar bear or a lion?
Thursday – creative thinking
- drawing of a part of the object in the message and a photocopy/pdf for each of student to be completed with a time limit. This should be related to the themes realized in a given period.
Friday – critical thinking
- a puzzle or a riddle- the longest word in the English language -> sMILEs – analogies, logic puzzles and a pun.
The best morning messages are both fun and informative.
More ideas and a broader discussion of this topic in English can be found here.
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