Special Education Classroom Daily Schedule- Morning Fitness and Morning Meeting
Morning Fitness takes place first thing in the morning..
After school wide flag salute students go straight to the playground for
free play for a few minutes. Once
everyone is situated, I start morning fitness.
It changes every day and
is the most laxed part of our day. Every day we do different
activities. Some examples include: swing
50 times, run around the handball courts, shoot the basketball, play tether
ball, handball and soccer. I try
to keep it fun and incorporate sharing, rule following and team building
skills. It’s not necessarily a drill sergeant type of PE.
visuals to prompt students to the activity. Sometimes we only do one
activity in the morning, and other days we do several.
The most important thing that occurs
during Morning Fitness is that my aides take students to the bathroom either in
groups or individually based on their needs so that we don’t have any
bathroom interruptions once we get into the classrooms. The ones that
need assistance get it, and those that just need to be sent go on their own.
This makes the morning routine in the classroom way better with less
interruptions.
thing we do when we step into our classroom following our morning fitness. My students put all of their belongings away
in their lockers, check their schedules and sit down to start Morning Meeting.
Morning Meeting is a 15 minute activity that, in my opinion, starts the
day in a fun way!
Morning Meeting is different every day but works on the
same necessary life skills: communication, social skills, and team building
skills. The main goal of Morning Meeting is to take attendance and say
good morning to everyone. While I am conducting Morning Meeting, my aides
can check my students back packs, pull out any communication logs, get student
lunch/snack out, and have the morning centers ready to go by the time Morning
Meeting is finished. Like I mentioned above, we do different activities
every day. We rotate through them so that my student’s don’t get bored!
First, we sing good
morning songs. Next, I call students up
to the front of the room to “check in.”
Their names are laminated and attached to the board with a magnet. Students find their name and put it in the
“present” or “absent” spot. I love using
the magnets because it makes it super interactive!
has “checked in” on the interactive bulletin board, they get to choose a
greeting to give me. The choices are:
wave hug, high five and shake hands. I
have visual cues to help aide the students.
They have a lot of fun picking which greeting they will do for the
day! We also work on answering
questions. I have created a simple
question binder that is laminated and attached with velcro. I use this
once or twice a week. Here are some pictures of my binder and the
questions I ask.
