critical thinking morning work

Out of the Box: Critical Thinking Morning Work

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The Magic of Morning Work: 5 Research-Based Strategies to Optimize Morning Work Time

Classroom Management , Routines & Systems , Time Management

In the rough draft of this blog post, I had planned to list out every NGSS and Common Core standard that you’re expected to teach your upper elementary students in a given year alongside various other reading, writing, and social skills. But as I was writing, I realized… You already know exactly how strapped for time you are. As an educator in the current age, you are fully aware that you need to make use of every single minute between the morning and afternoon bells, and you likely even already spend your own free time plotting out every block of the day, right down to morning work.

With so much to get through in a single year, it can feel frustrating trying to fit it all in. Worse yet, it’s hard to relax on your breaks when you’re stressing about time, which can affect you negatively in the long run. It’s a vicious cycle!

What can be done? First and foremost, acknowledge that you still deserve break time. Keeping yourself mentally well is most important. Then, learn how to optimize your time, even the periods that don’t seem as significant. Every hour of the day is precious, right down to your morning work block!

In upper elementary science and math classrooms, optimizing morning work time is a huge component of a successful day for both you and your students. A strong morning block starts your day off strong, maximizes instructional time, establishes a consistent routine, enhances learning throughout the day, and, most importantly, helps reduce your stress load.

To help keep your work days flowing smoothly, let’s take a deeper dive into the benefits of optimizing morning work as well as the strategies we can use to ensure you’re truly making the most out of the block.

Grab a cup of coffee—it’s time for your morning work!

Let's take a dive into the benefits of optimizing morning work as well as the strategies we can use to ensure you're truly making the most out of the block.

Optimizing Morning Work: 5 Benefits and Strategies

1. start your day strong.

Picture this: you wake up an hour late and scramble out of bed, only to realize you left your clothes in the washer overnight. Now you have to grab an old, too-small outfit from the back of the closet before rushing out the door… Except you lost your car keys, too! It seems like it’s just one thing after another—when you have a bad start to the day, it just snowballs, and you spend the whole day trying to catch up.

The good news is that it works the other way around, too. A strong start to your day helps keep you in a positive mindset, improving your focus and productivity. In fact, you can even reverse the effects of a bad start if you have something positive in the morning… Like a good morning work session!

To really start your classroom day off right, you want your morning work block to be oriented around a growth mindset . Growth mindset revolves around the following principles:

Intelligence is not fixed and can grow
Challenges are opportunities for growth
Effort helps students master skills
Failure is a step toward growth
Classrooms should foster a love and openness to learning
Positive self-talk
Peer collaboration

In short, growth mindset states that a person’s abilities and intelligence can be developed and improved over time through effort, learning, and perseverance, which is something I’ve worked to cover through my growth mindset classroom decor . Ultimately, implementing the tenants of growth mindset in your morning work block leads to a positive learning environment for your students that lasts throughout the day.

Growth mindset is easy to sit around and talk about, but how can you really implement it into your morning work? Let’s take a look!

Activity: Morning Mindset Reflection

For this activity, you’ll only need journals (or paper) and pencils. Take a moment, maybe five minutes, during your morning work block and ask students to reflect on a positive mindset and set goals for the day in their journals.

To help you out, I’ve come up with a list of prompts you can share to really get your kiddos (and yourself!) thinking:

Reflection:

What does it mean to have a “can-do” attitude or a positive mindset in your own words?
Think about a time when you faced something tricky or challenging. How did thinking positively help you with it?

Daily Goals:

What are three things you hope to do well in school or activities today?
Imagine one of your big goals. Break it into smaller steps to make it easier to reach your goals.
What can you do to stay excited and focused on your goals?

Challenges and Opportunities:

What things might be hard for you today?
What’s one way you can tackle the challenge with a positive attitude?

Learning and Growth:

What’s something new you’d like to explore or understand better today?
Can you share a time when you learned something new and felt really proud of yourself?

Positive Self-Talk:

When something feels hard or you’re not sure you can do it, what kind things can you say to yourself to stay encouraged?
Have you ever been in a situation where saying nice things to yourself helped you to keep trying?

Helping Others:

How can you be a good friend and help your classmates when they’re finding something difficult?
Think about a time when you helped someone. What did you do?

Reflect and Review:

Did you finish all your tasks yesterday?
Thinking about how you did yesterday, how can you keep thinking positively and working toward your goals today?

Although these prompts are geared toward your elementary students, I sincerely think it would be helpful for you to keep a mindset journal as well. Taking a moment of reflection for yourself in the morning is a great way to stay positive and focused, and it provides an excellent model for your kiddos to follow!

2. Maximize Instructional Time

It’s no secret that effective time management and good use of instructional time leads to a variety of benefits in your classroom. In fact, as an educator, you’ve likely come up with plenty of ways to maximize instructional time in your classroom; that’s practically your whole job!

Time management isn’t just helpful for you, either. Your students can reap a plethora of advantages from learning time management skills, such as increased productivity, engagement, and academic performance. Knowing what to expect from instructional time blocks throughout the day also helps reduce learning stress and anxieties and leads to a better school-life balance.

Activity: Task Time Allocation

For this time management morning work activity, you’ll need the class schedule, the morning agenda, a timer, and a piece of paper. Introduce the activity by letting students know that the goal is to help them (and you!) organize their tasks for the day and make the most of their morning work time.

Begin by displaying the class schedule or morning agenda where your kiddos can see it. Go through each item on the schedule, discussing the tasks, assignments, and activities planned for the day. This helps students understand what is expected of them and what they will accomplish, which makes it easier to set goals.

Discuss the importance of prioritizing tasks. Have students think-pair-share what they think are the most critical assignments or activities for the day. Then, head into a more individual experience by distributing copies of the morning work schedule to each student, then instruct them to allocate specific time slots for each task or assignment. Encourage your kiddos to make educated estimates of how long each task will take.

Then, provide students with timers to check how long each task actually takes. Have them follow the schedule they’ve created as you circulate the classroom, providing support and guidance as needed. Encourage students to stay on track and manage their time effectively.

At the end of morning work time, reconvene as a class and ask students to reflect on their experience. Were they able to complete their tasks within their allocated time slots? Was it easier than expected, or was it more difficult? Encourage kiddos to use the skills they’ve learned during morning work time in their daily routines. Continue to practice time allocation for your morning tasks! Over time, you and your kiddos will only grow at estimating and managing your time efficiently.

3. Establish a Consistent Routine

The most important thing you can do in your classroom is be consistent . From discipline to homework to your routine, consistency in all things is a HUGE necessity for upper elementary students! Consistency leads to predictability, which helps ease learning anxieties as well as reducing disruptions in the classroom.

In addition, consistency fosters a sense of independence and responsibility among students, increasing academic performance and even behavior as well as engagement. Not only that, but consistency is beneficial for you, too—you’ll always know what to do next!

A consistent routine starts at the beginning of the school day; that is, your morning work block. Getting that strong start means following your morning work schedule to a T, and it’s one of the best ways to have your classroom manage itself !

Activity: Creating Your Morning Routine

This activity is light on materials: all you need is a list of morning routine tasks prepared in advance as well as optional props that align with those tasks, such as backpacks or lunch cards. To prepare, brainstorm all the things your elementary students do in their morning routines, such as hanging up their backpacks, turning in lunch cards, pulling out yesterday’s homework, and so on. Collect these activities into a list.

Then, explain to your class that they will participate in a role-playing activity to practice establishing a consistent morning routine. Divide your students into small groups, with each group assigned a specific scenario on the list. For example, one group may simulate the morning routine of hanging up backpacks, while another group can act out how to obtain any assignments they missed if they were absent.

Students should use props to be as realistic as possible as they take turns presenting their morning work routine scenario to the class. Encourage them to demonstrate how to complete each task efficiently and establish a consistent routine. Other students can provide feedback on what they notice or ask questions about the activity.

Once every group has presented their part of the routine, get together as a whole class to reflect on the activity as well as the importance of establishing a consistent morning work routine. Ask students if they feel confident in the routine, and discuss whether they feel more comfortable knowing what to do in their morning work block. Being prepared for the day is always a great feeling!

4. Enhance Learning

Now that we’ve gone over the general structure of your morning work block, let’s examine ways to achieve active engagement in learning tasks in the morning—after all, active engagement can improve knowledge retention as well as set students up for academic success. I know you’re already fully aware of the benefits of keeping your kiddos engaged, so I won’t go into all that; instead, let’s explore a few academic concepts that can enhance learning during morning work.

One of the more common types of morning work is retrieval practice, where students “retrieve” information they’ve previously learned as a review lesson. However, if you’re currently in the middle of a tough lesson and want to gauge your students’ understanding, a formative assessment may be a better use of morning work time. Skill reinforcement is also a good choice!

Beyond these concepts, morning work time can also be used to develop time management skills as well as create a positive start to the school day. In addition, the morning block is a fantastic opportunity for individualized learning, including meeting with students who may need a bit of extra help—just be sure that you’re scaffolding, not rescuing !

Activity: Morning Mini-Challenge

This activity is short and sweet. All you’ll need is some kind of educational resource related to the day’s lessons, such as the Heartbreaker Review game or thematically-appropriate task cards . Provide your kiddos with a short, stimulating challenge following the theme of the day’s science or math topics, then reconvene as a class and discuss which concepts students are surprised to remember or which they need to study a bit more.

Pairing the morning mini-challenge with a formative assessment, like exit tickets or science writing prompts , is also a great way for you to receive feedback on where your students are at in the learning process. Morning work time is an excellent way for your kiddos to practice their new skills while showing you which areas you may need to revisit!

5. Reduce Stress

Reducing your stress load has an incredible amount of benefits for both you and your students. The positive effects of mindfulness and improving your emotional well-being lead to a more productive learning environment, beginning with morning work time!

Not only will you feel better when you’re under less stress, but those effects spread to your students, too. Modeling mindfulness to them fosters improved focus and attention, enhanced self-awareness, reduces learning anxiety, creates a positive classroom climate, and, of course, bolsters academic performance!

With that in mind, let’s explore a method to practice mindfulness in your upper elementary classroom.

Activity: Positive Affirmation Stones

There’s a good chance you’ve seen positive affirmation stones floating around somewhere, from gift shops to Pinterest, but chances are that they’ll be new and intriguing for your kiddos! To create your own, you’ll need one smooth, small stone for each student as well as permanent markers or paint pens. Then, begin the morning block by explaining the purpose of the activity: to reduce stress and promote positive thinking!

Distribute a stone to each student, or let them choose a stone that they like best. Then, instruct your students to think of a short phrase that makes them feel positive or encouraged, such as “I am enough,” “I can do this,” or “I am kind.” They should then use the permanent markers or paint pens to write their affirmation on the stone. For an added bonus, they can even decorate the stone with colors or symbols that they like!

Now, since you know I’m all about building those social skills in a constructive way, invite students to share their stones with the class or as groups. Learn from one another. Some students may have different motivations than others, which is A-OK!

Once students have finished sharing, guide the class through a brief mindful breathing exercise. Take a deep breath in, hold for a few seconds, then exhale slowly. Afterward, conclude the morning block by explaining that the stones your kiddos have created can be kept in their desks or another special place where they can easily access them whenever they need a moment of calm and positivity.

As an educator, time is your number one resource. Unfortunately, I can’t wave a magic wand and create more time in the school day for you, but I can research how to make the best of the time you’ve been given and bring you helpful tips on how to optimize it! If you make the most of your time at the very beginning of your day with your morning work block, you’re setting both you and your kiddos up for long-term success.

From reducing stress to fostering a positive learning climate to establishing a consistent routine, an optimized morning work block is essential for any well-run classroom. By implementing these strategies and matching activities into your upper elementary science and math classrooms, you’re helping raise the next generation of eager, excited lifelong learners!

Keep up the great work, and remember to use morning work time to your own advantage, too. In fact, spread the love to your teacher friends by sharing this blog post!

I’m rooting for you!