So this coming up year, we will once again be doing a morning gathering time. I so wish I had a Smart Board so that I could do a bunch of interactive Boardmaker stuff each morning but failing that I will be putting together a bunch of visuals to go through the following routine. Once the visuals are done, I will be posted them on adapted learning. Here is a run down on how the routine will go...
- Sign-in, Good Morning and Attendance - will have a visual with all students names/pictures in the center and then we will be putting them either "at school" or "at home" each day. This will be used for the student who is responsible for attendance to fill out the form and take it down to the office.
- Prayer - we are a Catholic school so we will do a prayer next. I'm still playing around with how to do this to ensure that the students are active participants in prayer.
- Calendar - will post a large monthly boardmaker calendar with special events and days at the beginning of the month. We will go through the date, the today is... yesterday was.. tomorrow will be... routine and then counting down to special days.
- Weather - will label the weather (sunny, rainy, cloudy, snowy, windy, stormy...etc.) with PEC symbols, label the temperature (hot, warm, nice, cool, cold, freezing) and also go through and decide what type of clothing should be worn today. Will have a large version of this Climate Clothing Set for that: http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/education/activities/pdf/Climate_Clothing.pdf
- Sharing Students Evenings and Feelings - We have both communication books where students put PECs of what they did and Step-by-Steps that parents help with so that students can share what they did the previous evening. This will be a sharing time for that. At the same time we will work on feelings and have students share how they are feeling.
- news-2-you Activities - Will go through an "everybody votes" activity where students vote on something related to the current news-2-you theme (students will work on communication, choice making, graphing, counting...etc.). Will also work in vocabulary somehow - perhaps with a word of the day. Then depending on time might do an activity - song, game, sensory exploration, story...etc. related to the theme.
- Classroom Jobs - on Monday mornings we will also assign classroom jobs for the week.