Having a fun and engaging morning meeting greeting can set your meeting up for success. When it falls flat, that vibe can carry through the entire morning meeting.

Freshen Up Your Morning Meeting

I like to try to use each morning meeting greeting no more than once a month. I find this keeps it fresh and fun. Repeating them (once in a while) is a great idea, though, because students become familiar with each greeting and there isn’t a need to explain how it works. After a month, they are usually excited to see that greeting resurface again.

Now, I know that keeping it fresh requires a lot of work. At the bottom of this post, I have a solution for you!

Keep It Simple

I like to mix in simple greetings as well as ones that are more involved. Don’t underestimate those simple greetings. They can be fun, too!

Simple greetings to try:

• peace sign
• high five
• handshake
• puppet hand hello
• bow
• fun voices
• partner’s choice
• greeter’s choice

And the list goes on… Let students have fun and let loose with these simple greetings. If you do, they are quite fun!

Different Languages

My students LOVE to learn words from different languages. I especially love to incorporate languages of the students in the class to give them the opportunity to feel like experts.

I suggest using google translate, if there isn’t a native speaker in the class, to allow students to hear the proper pronunciation before they greet each other in that language.

Ask Your Students

Once you’ve been doing morning meetings for a few months and students have a good hang of how it works, you can offer them the opportunity to give suggestions for the 4 morning meeting parts (morning meeting greeting, sharing, activity, and message). They get SO excited when their ideas are used and it allows them to be even more involved in our daily morning meetings.

Other Morning Meeting Greeting Ideas To Try

Origins Online has some 15 fantastic morning meeting greeting ideas.

Thought Co. wrote a post detailing 7 great morning meeting greetings.

A Word on Third outlines 4 fun morning meeting greeting ideas.

Check out Kindergarten Smorgasboard’s 13 morning meeting greeting ideas.

Glitter in Third put together a beautiful blog post outlining how morning meeting works in her classroom and she provides 9 engaging morning meeting greeting ideas.

If you don’t already own it, highly recommend purchasing The Morning Meeting Book by Responsive Classroom. They have great ideas for each of the 4 morning meeting parts. There are some good morning meeting greeting ideas to get started with.

No More Planning For Morning Meeting

I love morning meeting. I think it’s my favourite time of day, although Daily 5 is a close second.

There’s only one part of morning meeting that I don’t like… can you guess?

It’s the planning!

In order to keep it fresh and engaging, I feel like I’m forever on the hunt for new ideas for morning meeting. It takes some serious time to plan all four parts and I can better use that time on the weekends for sipping coffee and reading books.

SO, I came up with a solution.

Every month, I plan your morning meetings FOR you.

I create themed morning meeting slides for elementary teachers. In these slides, the greeting, sharing and group activity is already planned for you. All that’s left for you to do is to type in your morning message.

If you want to try two weeks of my morning meeting slides for free, click here to download the freebie!

If you want to check out the growing bundle, click on the cover picture below. Trust me, I’m already jealous of the time you’ll be freeing up!

Further Reading

To read more about morning meetings, check out my blog post Morning Meeting: Greetings, Sharing, Group Activities & Morning Message.