Name Card Greeting

Every day we start our morning meeting by greeting each other in a friendly way. A friendly greeting means:

• a smile
• eye contact
• use the other person's name

In the beginning of the year we practiced just these things. Now that we've got the friendly greeting routine in place, we are able to do lots of fun variations. We have done a thumbs up greeting, a high five greeting, a handshake greeting, a pinky shake greeting, a whisper greeting. Recently I taught students that we can greet each other in Spanish by saying "Buenos dias." One student taught us the French greeting, "Bonjour" and we had fun trying to say that. Another student plans to teach us how to greet one another in Chinese. If your child knows how to say hello in another language, she or he can let me know and we will include it in a morning meeting.  Sometimes we pass our greeting around the circle, and other times we make a choice of whom to greet and walk to that person across the circle until everyone gets a turn.

Today we did the name card greeting. Students simply draw a card, read the name, and greet that class member. This gave us a chance to practice some important first grade reading skills including: look at the whole word not just the first letter.