Hey everybody, let’s have a meeting! To begin our morning meetings we sing: “Come and meet me at the block carpet, the block carpet, the block carpet. Come and meet me at the block carpet, it’s time for morning meeting” (to the tune of Mary Had a Little Lamb).
With each of the three educators in the room taking turns facilitating the meeting, the songs and stories change, but the components stay the same. Lately, we have been starting by standing and singing O’ Canada. It’s so beautiful to hear the tune and words being sung as they so solemnly stand.
Following the opening song, we usually read a story or poetry. One of our favorite authors is Dennis Lee. The educators always make sure to let the children know who wrote the words to the story or poem. Even at the age of two, the children start to associate authors with their writings and are gaining an appreciation for literature. In the middle, we usually throw in a movement song like “Hokey Pokey” or “Shake, Shake, Shake Your Wiggle Out”, or “Baby Shark”.
Because some of the children are associating certain days of the week with certain events, we have started to talk about what day it might be and what happens on certain days like Saturday. That usually starts a discussion about gymnastics – who goes to gymnastics and what they do there. Funny thing – once one child claims they go to gymnastics, several others claim the same thing, too! There are a few songs that help us remember the order of the days and right now, we’re learning “There are seven days, there are seven days, there are seven days in a week, Sunday Monday, Tuesday Wednesday, Thursday Friday, Saturday”.
Morning meeting is such a great social event and really helps the children to build relationships and awareness of others. It also helps them develop their attention span, which in turn contributes their brain development and ability to make good choices. Morning meeting also provides the opportunity to engage in lots of imitative play, which is the play of the choice these days in our room.
