Morning Message

One of the things we include in our daily Skills Block is a "Morning Message." A morning message consists of two or three sentences that I write in front of the students. I leave out missing letters, vowels, blends, sight words, letter combinations, and punctuation. Students are called up to fill in the missing part. When we first began morning message, only a few letters were missing and they were mostly beginning sounds. Now, students are filling in beginning sounds, ending sounds, missing vowels, blends, letter combinations, and punctuation. Students try to remember that the first letter in the sentence has a capital letter. We also have discussed that the letter I (all by itself) is always capital as well as names. We try to decide what type of punctuation is needed at the end of each sentence. The morning message is a great way to cover so many skills in such a short period of time. It also allows me to make the skills multi-level, so that students who do not know all of their letters/sounds yet can practice those skills and the students who are ready for the next level of skill can be challenged with more difficult skills. In the morning message below, we filled in missing letters in black, underlined blends and digraphs in green, circled sight words in red, and came up with rhyming words down at the bottom in purple.