The Morning Message
The morning message is a great instructional activity for students of all ages. During this activity, the teacher writes a meaningful message in front of the students. This provides an opportunity to model print concepts, phonemic isolation, connecting sounds to letter knowledge, and much more! Set a time limit of 10 minutes to write for your students as they decode the message.
Begin by asking the students to get their mouth ready.
Then write the first letter and have the students give you the sound.
Write the next letter and have the students blend the sounds. (Unless the next letter creates a digraph.)
Ask the students to use the letters to predict what the word will be.
Ask the students to use the words written previously to predict the next word to be written.
Emphasize that what you read must:
- Make sense
- Sound right (grammatically)
- Look right (using letter-sound knowledge)
Ask the students to reread the message for fluency and using the punctuation marks and meanings of words to decide on the correct voice intonation and word phrasing.
Always write a complete paragraph that includes a main idea and supporting details.
Ask the students to identify the main idea. Underline or circle in green.
Ask the students to identify supporting details and explain why they are supporting and not the main idea.
**For younger children, have the students identify:
- A letter they know
- A sound combination they know
- A capital letter and where it is found
- A word they know
- An ending punctuation mark and how it is used
- The number of sentences in the message.
- The number of words in each sentence.
Happy teaching,
Kelly Harmon