Anyways, I wanted to post about morning work today! During my first year of teaching, I developed an aversion to morning work. At my school parents are welcome to wait outside your classroom door and bombard (sorry I'm not sorry for being dramatic) teachers with questions, requests, information about their children, etc... I was SO frustrated with this because I wasn't confident enough at the time to stop them or ask them to leave, and while I was busy talking to them my students were running wild in the classroom. My principal suggested that I give them some morning work to keep them occupied while I dealt with their parents and I, being the stubborn person that I am, thought, "why should I have to waste precious time that could be spent on instruction and prepare more materials just so I have time to talk to parents when they should know that teaching my class is my priority over talking to them". And that's how morning work and I got off on the wrong foot.
This year, I have let go of the past and made amends with morning work. I might even call it my new best friend. I still meet with my students to do our morning meeting first, and if parents try to interrupt I let them know that we are busy and will answer their questions after school or via email if they so wish to write it down. But as soon as we have sang good morning to each other, talked all about today, and updated our calendar, I send my kids to their tables to do morning work quietly for about fifteen minutes. During that precious, quiet time I am able to check their homework, take attendance, send things to the office, gather myself and everything I need for the day and, on some, very special days, drink my coffee.
I have created a 26 page morning work packet that you can grab here. Each day students can use these worksheets to review important beginning of the year skills such as handwriting, letter recognition, counting and cardinality, continuing patterns, and more. This product can also be used as homework!
Check it out and please be sure to leave me some feedback so I can continue to improve my products in order to best suit your needs!
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