You know that the morning is a crucial part of your student’s day, and what you do with the morning can shape heavily how your students engage throughout the rest of the school day. Morning activities for students can help them engage early in the day and get their minds in a receptive and receiving state that allows for greater learning potential. To help take the stress away from planning what to do each morning, we’ve listed out three morning activities for students that you might just love, like we did!
Morning Activities for Students
Get up and move
Kids have a ton of energy, especially first thing in the morning. And we’ve found that letting them express that energy at the start of the day gets them in the mood to learn. Take the first few moments of class to get everyone up from their seats and moving. Morning activities for students that involve being active can have wonderful effects on them. A few simple, kid-focused yoga poses will get your students active, focused, and give them a sense of calm and relaxation. You can have a ton of fun with this by having your students pick poses from a yoga pose deck and letting them create their own mini-practice.
Morning challenge
This is where you can get even more creative with your students (and yourself.) Morning challenges can get brain juices flowing in a light and free manner, enabling more analytical and focused concentration as you begin your lesson for the day. Morning activities for students that involve using their mind power in creative ways can indeed set the tone for the rest of their day. This morning challenge can range from anything like having your students describe in their own words an abstract photo as an intro to a writing lesson or leading a fun riddle for students. And you can make the riddle challenge even more engaging by giving rewards to those students who figure it out. Examples of rewards are allowing students the enticing offer of picking the game that’s played at recess or letting them choose the job that they do in the classroom for the week.
The compliment game
This one is great for boosting the moral of your students and making them feel better about themselves. Not to mention – this game is super easy to facilitate! Each student gets a piece of paper on their back, and every student has to write down a compliment on the paper on the backs of every other student. Afterwards, the students can read their paper and feel empowered by all of the compliments that they have been given. We especially love this game and found that it works great in just about every instance.
Have fun
There are so many morning activities for students that you can experiment with implementing. But remember, it’s all about finding out what your class likes and what gets them the most engaged. And don’t forget that you can have fun with it too! Let out your inner child and share that part of you with your students. You might just be surprised by how much more your students will relate to you when you do this. 🙂
And now that you know some great morning activities for students, make sure you’re getting your morning motivation in order too, so you’re always coming in refreshed and ready to teach. Check out some great morning motivation tips for teachers in our previous blog post to get your school days going smoothly!