Make the Most of Morning Work in Your Classroom with These 5 Tips [episode 180]

Heidi  0:01

This is episode 180 of Teacher Approved.

 

Heidi  0:06

You’re listening to Teacher Approved, the podcast helping educators elevate what matters and simplify the rest. I’m Heidi.

 

Emily  0:13

And I’m Emily. We’re the creators behind Second Story Window, where we give research based and teacher approved strategies that make teaching less stressful and more effective. You can check out the show notes and resources from each episode at secondstorywindow.net.

 

Heidi  0:28

We’re so glad you’re tuning in today. Let’s get to the show.

 

Emily  0:36

Hey there. Thanks for joining us today. In today’s episode, we’re sharing our top five tips for making the most of morning work, and we’ve got a teacher approved tip for helping manage classroom lost and found. Now, in case you didn’t know, Emily and I have a bit of a reputation for being the morning work sisters.

 

Emily  0:55

I know, don’t be jealous. Not everyone can be famous for creating morning work with really good story problems.

 

Emily  1:05

I think you might have a PhD in story problems now, don’t you? Heidi?

 

Heidi  1:09

I mean, I don’t know if it ranks as a PhD, but I’ve got to have some kind of like world record for most story problems written. I kind of hope that my tombstone someday is written as a story problem.

 

Emily  1:25

Well, it’s no exaggeration to say that we’re more than a little passionate about story problems and morning work. Whether you call it bell ringers, morning work, early birds or something else, we believe having a daily activity for your students to start the day with will transform your classroom.

 

Heidi  1:43

One of our favorite aspects of morning work is how much it actually benefits the teacher. It’s such a relief to not have to scrounge up for something to give your students every day. If you have done that daily run to the copier, you know that, yep, you’ve got to get the lunch count done. You got to get attendance and everything else done in the morning, and that assignment can be a lifesaver.

 

Heidi  2:07

But that doesn’t mean that morning work has to equal busy work.

 

Emily  2:11

Yeah, you can keep your students busy with work that matters, instead of just filling the time. Just because it keeps them busy doesn’t mean it’s busy work necessarily. So our goal is to create high quality, meaningful, independent morning work for students to begin each day.

 

Heidi  2:26

Having a predictable, worthwhile task at the start of the day is a key component to an effective morning routine. I don’t think we can overstate that. By making this part of your daily schedule, you minimize so many classroom management problems.

 

Emily  2:42

Plus this set morning routine is key to creating predictability and lowering anxiety for our students. I don’t know about you, but I always feel so much more comfortable going somewhere when I know what to expect when I arrive. So it is a gift for your students to know exactly how the morning will go when they arrive at school.

 

Heidi  3:01

Plus purposeful morning work helps your students solidify their skills and it encourages independence.

 

Emily  3:08

Purposeful is the key word there, though. This is a question we have devoted a lot of hours to solving. Each grade level set of morning work that we’ve created takes hundreds of hours to complete. So we’re not exaggerating when we say we’ve given it a lot of thought.

 

Heidi  3:24

Now we have done what we can to make this work well in your classroom, but there are some simple strategies you can use on your end to really maximize the benefit your students get from morning work. So today we are sharing our five best tips to help you make the most of morning work in your classroom. All right, Emily, kick us off with the first tip.

 

Emily  3:43

Well, the first tip is to use spiral review for your morning work. Spiral review involves repeatedly revisiting previously taught material, going a little deeper each time. This approach is powerful because it helps ensure students retain information, and it builds on their knowledge over time.

 

Heidi  4:02

Exactly. We want to break that dreaded learn it, test it, forget it cycle. We see that all the time. So let’s interrupt that where we can. With spiral review, you are constantly weaving past content into your instruction so that the knowledge doesn’t have a chance to get lost in the fog.

 

Emily  4:22

Now you can do spiral review at any time of the day. If it truly won’t work for you to do it in the morning, that’s okay do your spiral review after recess or at the end of the day, but morning work really is the perfect vehicle for spiral review because it’s a consistent, structured activity that sets the tone for your day. It is like a warm up for your students little brains.

 

Heidi  4:46

Right? You need an arrival task for your students anyway, so why not fit your spiral review into that time? It’s just really the perfect time of day to do it.

 

Emily  4:56

Our second tip is to keep it consistent. Of course, we think you will love using our morning work in your classroom, because it’s obviously the best. It’s got one page ready for you to use each day of the school year, and the spiral review content is designed for consistency with just enough variability to keep it interesting.

 

Heidi  5:14

But you know, we aren’t biased at all.

 

Emily  5:16

No way.

 

Emily  5:18

And no matter what you decide you want your morning work to be, the key really is to keep it consistent. You don’t want to start each day with a random worksheet that your students will need explained to them.

 

Heidi  5:28

And you don’t want to bounce around between a bunch of different morning work options either. That’s just a recipe for confused students at a time when you need them to understand what to do so they can do it independently.

 

Emily  5:39

So, decide what you want your morning work to be and stick to it so your students know exactly what to do when they arrive to school.

 

Heidi  5:46

So over the decades, yes, literally decades, that we have been making morning work, we’ve worked really, really hard to make sure our pages offer the support that students need to do their work independently. Now, at the very start of the year, they won’t be able to do independently, but after a couple weeks, they’ll have this down. Each page is an intentional blend of language arts and math questions, and then question types are repeated over the weeks so students understand what to do, but we throw in enough variety to keep kids from getting bored.

 

Emily  6:18

So if you look at a five day spread of our morning work, you’ll notice that the content gets slightly more sophisticated each day. So on day 91 the math questions use a lot of visual support. The questions have a lot of structure to help build a foundation of understanding. Over the week, or over two weeks of an advanced topic, we slowly peel back the support, and by the end of the week, students are working on the material at a more abstract level.

 

Heidi  6:44

And that consistency is key. It’s what allows students to master the content at a deeper level, and it gives them tools to transfer their understanding to other settings. So really do what you can to keep that morning work as consistent as possible.

 

Emily  6:59

Now our third tip is my favorite tip. I mean, I wish I could get this tattooed on my forehead. You have to offer feedback. One of the best ways to help your students retain information is to give them feedback on their work right away.

 

Heidi  7:14

Okay but don’t panic. We’re not suggesting that you should grade each student’s work as soon as they finish it. In fact, we don’t think you should take a grade for morning work at all, because really, right now, with this task, the goal is learning and not the grade.

 

Emily  7:28

The best way, and also the easiest way, to offer feedback on your students morning work is by correcting the work together as a class. This is the perfect way to keep your finger on the pulse of student understanding and see if your students are struggling with any concepts.

 

Heidi  7:45

And that can be such important feedback for helping you understand how you need to tweak your lessons and what kind of support you need to offer going forward. But that feedback doesn’t just help you, it also helps your students recognize what they know and what they don’t know. It is really common, like it’s been studied. It’s so common for learners to fall into the trap of thinking that they have a good understanding of something when in fact, they are very shaky on that topic. And then we all find out about it when the test scores come back.

 

Emily  8:16

Correcting morning work together is a way to interrupt the pattern of overconfidence when students think they know something, it’s important to have that idea confirmed or corrected, otherwise, students just move on without filling in the gaps of their understanding, right?

 

Heidi  8:31

I know hearing this, it sounds like it’s just another thing to add to an already crowded schedule, but correcting morning work as a class, is an important part of the process. It gives you the opportunity to clear up any misconceptions that your students may have about any of the concepts that you covered that day.

 

Emily  8:49

It’s easy to overlook, but learning with feedback is almost magical. In one study, when students received simple feedback that they either got a quiz question correct or not, their learning increased by an entire letter grade, even though they didn’t receive an explanation as to what they got wrong.

 

Heidi  9:06

But those gains are even greater if we explain why an answer is correct instead of just whether or not it is correct. The three to five minutes it takes to discuss the morning work every day have a bigger payoff than almost anything else you could do in that time. So we strongly encourage you to add correcting time into your day, if it is at all possible.

 

Emily  9:29

When I was teaching second grade, I did not have a projector, so we just went over each question by number and discussed the correct answers. And if there was a math question that many struggled with, we would talk about where they got stuck, and then we could work through it together on the board.

 

Heidi  9:43

But correcting as a class is even better if you have a way to project the page so that students can see you complete each question as they correct their own work.

 

Emily  9:51

Ideally, this is something you can do together every day, but we know that the ideal doesn’t always happen. If you are short on time, some days you can make this really quick, and just take time for more discussion on the trickier questions.

 

Heidi  10:04

Correcting morning work together also opens the door for our fourth tip, which is to use your morning work to preview new content.

 

Emily  10:11

We’ve done our best to pace our morning work content slowly, but chances are good that at times, no matter what morning work you use, it will cover a concept before you have had a chance to teach it. Some might think that this is a problem, but it’s actually a great opportunity.

 

Heidi  10:27

You can use these moments to give students a quick preview of something they’ll be learning about soon. It’s a great way to introduce new ideas in a low stress way.

 

Emily  10:36

And if you have time, you can do a quick on the spot mini lesson about the concept, students generally have to hear new information many times before it sticks. So previewing content is a great way to build a foundation for new information to come.

 

Heidi  10:51

Our fifth and final tip for making the most of morning work is to keep it manageable for yourself. And there are few ways you can do this.

 

Emily  11:00

I think one of the best ways to keep it manageable is to get out of the habit of making copies each day. You don’t want to start the day with a frantic run to the copy machine if you can avoid it.

 

Heidi  11:11

Emily and I were lucky, because our school district had a copy shop where we could get a whole year of morning work printed and bound into a book for each student. Each day, the students just pulled out their book and they got right to work. It was so easy, so easy.

 

Emily  11:24

But sadly, we know this is not an option for every teacher. If you have to make the copies at school, plan ahead by printing out as 10 page packets. That will give you two weeks of double sided morning work. And you could even go wild and try a whole month in a packet, then you’ll be visiting the copy machine far less often.

 

Heidi  11:44

If you have parent helpers or instructional aides who can help with office tasks, this is the perfect project to outsource.

 

Emily  11:50

Another way to keep your morning work manageable is by skipping the grading. Like we mentioned earlier, there is truly no reason to correct each student’s work each day you will waste so much time doing this.

 

Heidi  12:02

Yeah I volunteered for a teacher who happened to be using our morning work just randomly, coincidental, and she wanted it corrected every day. So when I go, I would correct the morning work. And I was always like, Don’t do this. The kids aren’t getting anything out of this. And it’s just more work for the teacher or the volunteer in this case. Your students will get way more out of morning work if they are involved in the process of correcting it as a class. And you can still get a really good idea of who’s struggling by just walking around the room and taking a peek at their work.

 

Emily  12:31

If you do have to take a grade for morning work, consider a pass fail if they completed it or not, or just choose the question on the page that you think is most important, and grade that question.

 

Heidi  12:43

All right, we’ve got one last idea for making morning work manageable, and that is to schedule a time for questions.

 

Emily  12:49

Yes. This is a game changer. The last thing you want is to spend all of morning work time answering questions. Whole point is for them to be busy and you to be busy. So we designed our morning work to be very predictable, which reduces a lot of questions, but there are bound to be some questions still.

 

Heidi  13:06

So my students would come in at the first bell, and you know, they’d kind of wander in over 5,10 minutes. And I taught them to get started, and if they came to a question that they were unsure how to answer, they could skip it, and then just move on to the next question. Then we do morning announcements on the pledge.

 

Heidi  13:21

And then right after that, I would ask if anyone had questions. By then they’d had a chance to preview most of the page, and then I could quickly answer any questions, so the whole class would know what to do. Because, you know, if one student has a question, probably multiple kids are going to have a question. It really made the whole process so much easier, and it helped my students be independent, which is the goal of this activity, because, you know, the secretary is waiting on me to send my attendance.

 

Emily  13:22

Well, if you are ready to take morning work to the next level in your classroom, we know that our spiral review morning work can be a game changer. We designed our 180 day morning work to thoughtfully spiral review the most important math and language content for each grade level. A lot of high impact learning and practice is crammed into one page of morning work.

 

Heidi  14:09

Yeah, I like to think of it as, like gears in a clock, and they’re all just working together to create this intense, powerful learning experience that are just packed into a few minutes of your day.

 

Emily  14:22

That’s the perfect way to describe it. And I can say with assurance that every single detail on a page was given thought. We take everything really seriously about our morning work.

 

Emily  14:34

And we have heard from hundreds of teachers over the years about…

 

Emily  14:34

1000s of teachers

 

Heidi  14:34

…About how morning work has helped in their classroom. We’ve even heard from some substitutes who have used it in classrooms and loved it. But we love this feedback from Denise; And she said, “The variety of work on these worksheets is amazing. I love that my students begin reviewing concepts at the beginning of the day, and many of these worksheets spark such amazing questions. This has been the best purchase I have made for my classroom.”

 

Emily  15:05

I love that. But no matter what you decide to use for morning work, remember these tips to help you make the most of morning work. Consider using spiral review, keep it consistent, offer feedback, use your morning work to preview new content and keep it manageable.

 

Heidi  15:23

We’d love to hear your experiences with using morning work or any tips that you might have, so come join the conversation in the teacher approved Facebook group.

 

Emily  15:31

Now let’s talk about this week’s teacher approved tip. Each week we leave you with a small, actionable tip that you can apply in your classroom today. This week’s teacher approved tip is, have a loose pieces bin. Tell us about this, Heidi.

 

Heidi  15:45

Well, Emily and I were talking, and we thought we had already mentioned this tip, so we had to go back through our records, and we realized that we haven’t talked about this in almost three years of having a podcast.

 

Emily  15:55

I know I can’t believe that, so we are very sorry that we’ve been holding out on this one, because that’s a good one.

 

Heidi  16:00

It’s really so helpful. So the idea is that you have a small bin or box tucked into a corner of the room. I just kept a little box next to my turn in tray. The purpose of this box is to collect any random bits of classroom life that get left out.

 

Emily  16:16

And this is not a lost and found. If you find someone’s mitten or lunch box, you want to put those in a different place. This is for those game pieces, flash cards and stray math manipulatives that are always floating around after the kids have, quote, unquote, cleaned up.

 

Heidi  16:31

Yeah, kids versions of cleaned up is not always what we would agree with, yep. The nice thing about having a set place for these loose pieces is that it saves you from losing them a second time. I had a really bad habit where, you know, a kid would find some leftover dice at the end of the day and would bring them to me, and probably 100% of the time, I would just set them down to deal with later, because I didn’t have time in that crazy moment to put them away right then. And then those dice would just get lost and uncovered over and over again for the next six weeks until I finally could put them away.

 

Emily  17:04

If you can tell the kid with the dice just to put them in the bin, or even better, if you can train them to put those things in the bin automatically without asking you, you are eliminating one tiny headache that can snowball into big headaches.

 

Heidi  17:18

I also found that with the loose pieces bin, I could wait to put things away until I could do a bunch at once. It was really nice to be able to put a few weeks worth of stray math manipulatives away at the same time, rather than having to dig them out of my cupboard every time that we found one of those rogue based 10 cubes. You know, the little guys get everywhere.

 

Emily  17:39

If you don’t have a loose pieces bin, this is definitely something to start. So find a small bin and an out of the way place that your students can reach. You may even want to put a label on the bin as a reminder. Then teach your students what to do every time a bookmark or magnet letter is left on the floor. You will be so happy to have one less thing to worry about at cleanup time.

 

Heidi  17:59

To wrap up the show we are sharing what we’re giving extra credit to this week. Emily, what gets your extra credit?

 

Emily  18:04

I’m giving extra credit to Shrinking, season two. I freaking love shrinking. It’s maybe one of my favorite shows of all time. Season Two started a couple months ago, but I wanted to wait till it was all out so I could binge it at once. So I just this last week, kind of binged the whole season two. And man, it was so good. I loved it even more than season one.

 

Emily  18:29

And if you don’t know what shrinking is, it is about Jimmy, who is a therapist who has some unconventional methods that his boss does not love. His boss, Harrison Ford. Yes, his hilarious, grumpy old boss. Harrison Ford and Jimmy, at the same time, is also dealing with a lot of stuff in his own personal life, and is just so well written.

 

Emily  18:54

I love all of the characters. I love the banter. I mean, this is not for everyone. There’s definitely a lot of language, so keep that in mind. But I can’t recommend it enough. If you liked Ted lasso, I think you would really like Shrinking. And I’m not going to say anything else about season two, because I don’t think Heidi’s watched it yet.

 

Heidi  19:11

So I haven’t I I’ve been waiting. I need to get started on that because, like, one thing I really like about Shrinking is that it’s real without getting like too gritty or distressing.

 

Emily  19:24

Yeah, they tackle heavy topics in a way that doesn’t make you depressed.

 

Heidi  19:28

Yes, which I think is what Ted lasso was also able to do.

 

Emily  19:31

Yeah, 100% and I actually think I’m gonna go back and re watch season one and then season two again, because I enjoyed it so much. And I miss, I missed the characters already. What are you giving extra credit to Heidi?

 

Heidi  19:45

I’m also giving extra credit to a TV show. It is called A Man on The Inside. This is on Netflix. It stars Ted Danson as a retired widower who’s just feeling really lost about his purpose, and he answers an ad asking for an older person to go undercover in a retirement home, because there have been some thefts going on, and they need to figure out who is stealing from all the old people. So it’s very sweet. It’s a Mike Sure Show. If you know Mike Sure, he works on the office. He was behind Parks and Rec and The Good Place.

 

Emily  20:21

He did Brooklyn 9-9- too. Man, he’s a gift.

 

Heidi  20:26

Yes, and this show right up there with them. It’s so sweet. You get all these fun, quirky characters. And if you know his other shows, you will see lots of familiar faces. It’s just so sweet and heartwarming. And it’s, you know, look at aging and grief and what love and connection really mean in the scheme, I think, like it’s, it’s got all the heart, and it’s so funny. I loved it. It was perfect. And I know Season Two has already been ordered, so…

 

Emily  20:53

Oh, good. I was wondering about that. Yes, I loved this too. So I co sign this extra credit.

 

Heidi  20:58

So now people have got lots of good TV to catch up on. That’s it for today’s episode. Make morning work a key part of your morning routine, and don’t forget to set up that loose pieces bin.

 

Heidi  21:12

We hope you enjoyed this episode of teacher approved. I’m Heidi.

 

Emily  21:16

And I’m Emily. Thank you for listening. Be sure to follow or subscribe in your podcast apps that you never miss an episode.

 

Heidi  21:23

You can connect with us and other teachers in the teacher approved Facebook group. We’ll see you here next week. Bye, for now.

 

Emily  21:29

Bye!