Writing Strategies with Morning Message

At the beginning of the year, we religiously completed a morning message.  The students seemed to enjoyed this time, and I noticed that it even helped some of the students come out of their shells. It helped to create a safe place to share ideas, give suggestions and practice speaking in front of each other. 

As the year went on, this routine fizzled out. I take full responsibility for that one. I can't say that, as a general activity, it was really missed by the students. Sure there were a few who asked about it, but the students weren't on my case demanding a Morning Message. 

When I reflect on it though, I have to say that Morning Message holds a lot of value, and in the future, I'm going to make more of an effort to ensure we use it on a regular basis.  This time was spent on more than your basic fill-in-the-blank activity. We covered a lot of ground in 10-15 minutes. 

I was able to model writing for them on a daily basis. When we were learning to write letters, I wrote one to the students every day. It gave me a chance to focus on letter format, appropriate greetings, and I gave examples of different formal endings.  Sometimes the letter was up on the board before they got in, and some days I wrote it in front of them.  We focused on mood and voice. We tried to challenge our vocabulary by using interesting words. 

In general, we talked about spelling and letter sounds. All the time.  We focused a lot of the time on "tricky" words, like when a c makes an s sound, or when gh are silent partners making an i say it's name.  We talked about synonyms and homonyms. We talked verbs, adjectives and nouns. We experimented with punctuation and capitalization. We talked about simple and compound sentences. And then it all just fizzled out like a glass of soda turned flat. 

Why?

To be honest I can't really nail down one reason in particular. I think it has to do with a group of reasons. 

1.  I was writing every day, and some days I felt like "we did this message already". I guess there's a boredom factor. 

2.  I would have preferred to write up the next day's message at the end of the school day, but I'm officially done at 1:50pm, and I didn't always stay until 3:30pm. That left me feeling like I just added another item to the To Do List in the mornings.  

3.  Some days I had major writer's block. That was not fun. 

4.  There was definitely the classic "time factor".  Some days I just felt like there was too much that we had to do, and in those crunch times, Morning Message was the first thing to go. 

Off the top of my head, I guess those would be some of the hurdles for me. But as I look at them now, I see that there are some places where I can make changes. 

1.  Boredom. My students didn't show they were bored, and never commented how the messages seemed the same so I guess, suck it up lady!

2.  Time table. That's one I can't change. Let it go. 

3.  Writer's block. I could have some pre-prepped pieces ready to go. I could also have students write the morning message. 

4.  Time. Let's get real. Sometimes it's out of my hands. There are definitely those days, or even weeks, where time flies out the window and there are never enough hours in the day and you're doing whatever you can to stay afloat. It might be certain points throughout the year that affect educators in general (finals and exam times, report cards and activities happening in school for example), but sometimes your personal life takes the front seat and that's a different kind of crazy for everyone and is simply unpredictable.  However...

Sometimes, the "no time" thing, is definitely my fault. I can be a procrastinator.  Usually it's small responsibilities that stack up and eventually take over my desk and my life. If I would have just dealt with them for 5 minutes, it would have been done. But I have to admit that I tend to think like this, "It's only 5 minutes, I'll do it tomorrow".  Before I know it I have a list of 5 minute items to contend with, and suddenly I have a project. (I never seem to learn...).  The lesson here is that I need to ditch the procrastinator in me. She's no help anyway. 

When I weigh the pros and cons, I see how valuable Morning Message is.  It's a great opportunity to have mini lessons around writing conventions, sentence fluency, voice, ideas, organization and word choice. I get to spend about 15 minutes a day doing focused lessons for writing, and that is definitely time well spent.