Free Morning Meeting Google Slides and Belonging Activities for SEL in the Classroom
Looking for morning meeting Google Slides for your social-emotional learning lessons? I’ve created Google Slides that are teacher-facing and student-facing for each SEL morning meeting unit. Check out what I’ve created and be sure to get your free morning meeting slides for teaching a sense of belonging in the classroom!
ABOUT SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL LEARNING MORNING MEETINGS
If this is your first time visiting Tarheelstate Teacher, you may be less familiar with the theme-based morning meeting structure. I’ve created SEL morning meeting units that use common themes in literature.
Social-emotional learning topics include things like belonging (seen here!), kindness, compassion, perseverance, conflict resolution, courage, growth mindset, managing our emotions, and responsibility to name a few. Through these SEL units, students are supported in developing social-emotional skills while building a stronger classroom community.
The purpose of a SEL morning meeting is similar to that of a regular morning meeting routine with the goal of building community and focusing on students’ social and emotional learning and development. Using themes in literature as the thread that ties morning meeting lessons together has the added benefit of complementing and helping me teach my literacy standards (read about ALL the benefits of using themes here).
These free morning meeting Google Slides focus on helping students develop a sense of belonging in the classroom and creating inclusiveness for others—a key component of feeling like a community!
MORE ABOUT THE FRAMEWORK FOR SEL MORNING MEETINGS
In my SEL morning meetings, I use many teaching strategies, like self-reflection and personal goal setting, read alouds, key vocabulary, videos and music, related quotations, discussion, and journal activities.
Structured in a path from the introductory launch to culmination and closure, I take my students through 5 main phases:
Exposure/Launching the Theme
Introducing the Theme, Self-Reflection, and Goal Setting
Student Discussion
Building the Theme
Consolidating Learning, Reflecting, and Creating Closure
You’ll see these phases play out as I share more about the FREE MORNING MEETING GOOGLE SLIDES! If you read through this information and want to learn even more about the SEL morning meeting approach, you’ll find this blog post (with lots of pictures!) helpful.
Let’s get to the morning meeting GOOGLE SLIDES! I’ve created a “student-facing” set of morning meeting Slides for the teacher to use to guide the lessons. You’ll find lots of space to record comments and thoughts from the student discussions. You’ll also find morning meeting notebooks in Google Slides for each individual student—much like a paper-based morning meeting journal.
EDITABLE LESSON PLANS FOR MORNING MEETING IN GOOGLE SLIDES
To make it even easier to use these morning meeting Slides and implement SEL morning meetings, I’ve included 15 days of editable lesson plans for the teacher! (YAAAAAAAAAAAASS!) You’ll be able to easily customize your plans for morning meetings and social-emotional learning with these editable lessons!
Let me send you everything shown in this post and more! Just enter your details below!
GUIDED TEACHING MORNING MEETING SLIDES WITH RECOMMENDED READ ALOUDS AND VIDEOS
In the launch phase, I either show students a short video, read aloud a picture book, or use an inspiring quotation related to the theme. To help kick off teaching a sense of belonging in the classroom, I’ve included discussion Slides for a popular book on belonging, Big Al by Andrew Clements, and the video “Say Something” found on YouTube.
KEY VOCABULARY SLIDES FOR INTRODUCING YOUR MORNING MEETING THEME
After launching the theme unit, I introduce key vocabulary related to the theme. To teach belonging in the classroom, this includes a sense of belonging definition as well as the terms:
acceptance
community
exclude
These key vocabulary terms help myself and students talk more precisely about cultivating a sense of belonging in the classroom and help students develop a deeper understanding of our morning meeting topic. These terms and definitions also help us name what we observe in our read alouds, videos, and quotations that we use during the theme unit. I’ve included a sense of belonging vocabulary slide in the teacher and student morning meeting Google Slides.
STUDENT RATING SCALES, REFLECTION, AND GOAL SETTING
Self-reflection and journaling are an important part of my SEL morning meetings. Students get to know themselves better, reflect on how the theme has shown up in their lives, and set goals for improving in relation to the theme. After introducing the vocabulary, students complete a self-reflection where they rate themselves on a few questions. This reflection helps them set a personal goal for our theme.
The belonging questions that I include in the self-reflection are:
1) How good am I at helping others feel they belong?
2) How strong is my sense of belonging?
In addition to a personal goal, you can also work with students to create a goal for the class to work on during this unit of study. At the end of the unit, students reflect on how they did with the goal they set at the beginning of the unit. They also think about how they might continue working to improve in that area. You can see an example of a whole-class goal and students’ post-reflection slide in the image below.
SEL MORNING MEETING WHOLE-GROUP DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
After I’ve launched the theme with a read aloud, video, or quotation, introduced key vocabulary, and had students self-reflect, it’s time to move into the discussion phase of our unit. My role during this phase is to learn more about students’ thoughts on the topic, elicit their ideas and understandings, and to allow students to discuss those thoughts and share with one another.
Students have one slide of 3 key discussion questions. In the teacher Slides, I’ve included one question per slide so that you can record students’ ideas collectively as you have a discussion about it.
The three discussion questions I’ve included for teaching a sense of belonging in the classroom are:
What are some times/places where someone may feel that they don’t belong?
What are some times/places where you feel that you belong?
What are some ways you can make sure others feel included?
BUILDING ON THE THEME
Within the Google Slides and editable lesson plans, I’ve included additional anchor charts and student activities to extend their learning and thinking about the topic. During the “Building” phase, we read more read alouds on the theme and complete other discussion activities to help students make connections and deepen their understanding of the topic.
For example, I think it’s important to discuss “Behaviors that Exclude” when discussing belonging, so I’ve included an anchor chart slide in the teacher and student files. (In that blog post, I share the steps I go through to name and discuss exclusionary behaviors with students).
Another fun belonging activity I’ve included is an ABC’s of BELONGING and INCLUSION list where students come up with positive words related to belonging and inclusion for each letter of the alphabet. In the editable lesson plan outline for Belonging, you’ll find 6-7 days of ideas for building on the theme.
MAKING TEXT-TO-TEXT CONNECTIONS
Because reading aloud picture books and viewing videos related to the theme is such a huge part of my SEL morning meeting units, I take the time to help students develop and deepen the text-to-text connections found across the literature I’ve shared with them. It’s in this part of our unit that students start coming up with “big ideas” and making generalizations about our theme! (WIN-WIN for the literacy standards!)
NOTE, I’ve included suggested books on belonging for read alouds and a YouTube playlist to make it easier to plan the extension belonging activities for your unit.
CULMINATION PHASE AND QUOTATION RESPONSES
I’ve included 5 related belonging quotes Slides where students are prompted to analyze and respond to the belonging quotes. Students can also connect the quotation to the theme you are studying and the read alouds and videos they’ve experienced. You can compile thoughts from a class discussion onto the teacher quotation Slides.
I weave quotation analysis throughout my SEL morning meeting framework. Sometimes, I can use the perfect quotation to LAUNCH our unit. Other times, we analyze a quotation in a lesson when we are building the theme. I also like to have students respond to one quotation when we wrap up our unit. I can use this as a culminating activity that shows me what students have gained from studying the theme. You can choose a quotation for students or allow them to choose their own from the ones included.
GET THE FREE GOOGLE SLIDES FOR YOUR FIRST MORNING MEETING
Developing a classroom climate where students understand that it is their responsibility to help everyone feel like they belong is one of the most important goals I have on my to-do list for the first week of school—but I would use this sense of belonging in the classroom unit at any time of the year and have used it in January before! You can get the belonging activities, teacher Slides, student Slides, and editable lesson plans that you see here sent to your inbox for FREE! This free sense of belonging unit is packed with lesson ideas, student journal pages, belonging quotes, discussion prompts, self-reflections, extension belonging activities, and more!
OTHER SEL MORNING MEETING GOOGLE SLIDES
I have recently updated all my morning meeting SEL units to include teacher and student Google Slides. These have been added to the original resource listings on Teachers Pay Teachers or my Tarheelstate Teacher website store at no extra cost!
You can check out all of the SEL morning meeting units below, but please be sure to grab your free belonging materials! I can’t wait for you to get a hold of them and try them out with your students!
SEL THEMES TO GUIDE YOUR MORNING MEETINGS ALL YEAR LONG
If you’d like more social-emotional learning units with a focus on encouraging students’ social, emotional, and academic success, you may be interested in the SEL Morning Meeting Mega Bundle of 17 theme units. With SEL units focused on kindness, compassion, growth mindset, gratitude, perseverance, responsibility, managing emotions, and so much more, your engaging morning meeting activities and lesson plans are done for you and your students will love them! You can save 10% on the Mega Bundle of all 17 themes with the code MM10.
