The importance of quality daily morning work is often overlooked in the upper elementary classroom. Your morning routine is the perfect time to set the stage for the day and sneak in some valuable learning time. If done right, your morning routine can be one of the most significant parts of your instructional day. Morning work should be a manageable, relevant, and useful teaching tool.
Why Use Daily Morning Work?
I often get asked, why should I have morning work? The answer is a little more straightforward than you might think. Morning work acts as a transition for students. It takes them from what could be a chaotic morning and gets them ready to learn. Time is valuable and having morning work that is effective can turn twenty random minutes of your day into quality learning time. Morning work sets the tone for the day and reduces behavior issues. Instead of trying to calm students when you are ready to teach, students are already ready for learning.
Characteristics of Quality Daily Morning Work
There is “good” morning work, and there is “bad” morning work. If you are giving your students something to do just to keep them busy for a few minutes, that is not quality morning work. Don’t beat yourself up over it because we have all been there. However, when you do find the right resource, magical things can happen. Here are the things I ask myself when I look for a quality morning work program:
- Is it manageable? To be effective, morning work should be something that your students can actually do. Students should be able to complete it in the designated time allotted. If my focus is math, I like to give about 6-8 problems depending on the concepts. If it’s reading, I like to give one passage with just a few questions.
- Is it relevant? Any work that is given should be relevant to what your students have already learned or what you want them to master. I always make usre my morning work is directly aligned with our standards and reviews the skills that I know have been taught and my students are required to learn.
- Is it useful? When I say “useful” I mean, is the work providing you with insights into your students’ progress? As a teacher, are you able to use the work assigned to see where your students are and where they could use a little extra help? For me, this is the most critical criteria for quality morning work. This is a main reason I use a spiral review system for morning work in my classroom.
Spiral Review as Daily Morning Work
After years of trying out new strategies for my daily morning work routines, I finally tried a spiral review system. To put it simply, spiral review is when you consistently review concepts with students. What goes around comes around. Here is why it works so well:
- Spiral reviews are short and manageable.
- The repetitive format increases independence, which is precisely what you need this time of day.
- Students get time to practice skills they have learned with our daily morning work routine.
- Teachers can collect data and see where students still need help. The data you collect can be used to drive future instruction.
Weekly Morning Routine
At this point, I’m sure you’re understanding why a spiral review is a great tool in the morning. However, you may be wondering what this looks like in the classroom.
- On Monday, I start by placing a new spiral review sheet on each students’ desk. Sometimes, I focus on math, while others I focus on reading or grammar. That depends on what your students need.
- Each morning, students complete a single column.
- Before the day begins, I take about 5-8 minutes to review the answers. I usually project the answer key on the board and we discuss. I allow students to update their answers using a colored pencil or pen to see where they made mistakes.
- On Friday, instead of their typical spiral review sheet, my students get a mini quiz that explicitly targets the skills they have been reviewing throughout the week.
- This assessment is what I will use to collect data on where my students are currently performing and where they still need help.