Classroom mornings can be super stressful. Dysregulated students, homework and permission slips to collect, early buses, late drop-offs, wanting to check in with every student – it’s a LOT. Bus drama was my biggest hang-up as a teacher. It was so challenging to help manage and support student conflict when I was also trying to facilitate morning work and bell-ringer activities. Insert morning choices.
What are morning choices?
Each day, we started our morning with 20 minutes of Morning Choices. Since I had discovered that our mornings were easily our most chaotic time, we needed something different than academic, teacher driven work. CHOICE is so powerful for students, but what about the need for structure?
I created a simple clip chart with student names and a variety of choices for students to pick from to engage in for their first 20 minutes during the day.
How does this really help with classroom mornings?
When students entered the classroom, they clipped their name on their choice for the morning. With our paraprofessional supervising, I was able to put out small fires, take attendance, and do morning check-ins with each student while they eased into their day. This was so much easier than power struggles over completing bell-ringer activities and wishing I could clone myself three times over.
As a teacher, I always felt stressed by morning routines. Bell-ringer work felt like it needed to be changed constantly, copies always needing to be made, and – do I need to hold students accountable? What happens if they don’t do it? Being free of that felt really good and made MY mornings less stressful.
Good news – my students loved this too. They often chose new and different choices every day which was really fun to see. My artsy friends would try STEM bins and sensory boxes at times. I loved seeing the way they expanded their interests through this structured yet choice based time!
You can snag the watercolor morning choices here, and the blues/greens morning choices here. Also – they’re editable!
