End of Year Morning Meeting Questions

Morning meetings are a great way to create a strong classroom community, foster communication skills, and set a positive tone for the school day. 

As the end of the school year approaches, these meetings become an excellent opportunity to reflect on the past year, celebrate individual growth, and look ahead to the coming year. In this blog post, we’ll discuss the purpose of morning meetings, how to implement them effectively, and specific ideas for thought-provoking questions to make the end of the year a little more meaningful for your students.

My goal with this article is that you can start to implement morning meetings easily in your classroom, even if you haven’t done them all year. Or, if you’ve been doing them all along, you’ll walk away with more ideas about how to structure your morning meeting at the end of the year.

What Is a Morning Meeting?

First thing’s first. A morning meeting is a structured, but flexible part of the school day where teachers and students gather to connect, communicate, and prep for the day ahead. 

Often associated with the Responsive Classroom approach, morning meetings include activities that promote social-emotional learning, critical thinking, and a sense of community.

While you’ll definitely find resources on how to put a morning meeting together, there isn’t one right or wrong way. You can have a morning meeting that’s more focused on social emotional learning, meetings that offer more of a daily review, neither, or a mix of both. The beauty of these meetings is they can be crafted to fit the needs of your classroom and students.

Generally, these are the 4 parts of a morning meeting (don’t worry, we’ll discuss these in depth later)

1. Greeting
2. Sharing
3. Group Activity
4. Morning Message

What’s the Focus of a Morning Meeting, and What Do Kids Get Out of It?

Morning meetings offer students a chance to:

• Build positive relationships with classmates and teachers.
• Develop social skills through meaningful discussion and group work.
• Practice routines that foster a sense of belonging and readiness for learning.

Whether you teach in an elementary school, middle school, or high school, morning meetings provide a great way to start the day with intention and connection.

Morning Meetings in the Special Education Classroom

In a special education setting, morning meetings can be tailored to meet diverse needs. Visual supports, simple language, and clear routines help students engage intentionally. The focus might include fostering communication skills, celebrating small successes, and addressing individual goals.

The goals of your morning meeting may also change depending on the levels of your students. We all know the demographics of your classroom may change over time, so it’s important to be flexible with how you structure these meetings.

It’s also a great opportunity for students to have some control over their learning. These meetings can easily become student led and involve lots of student choice. This is a favorite way of mine to allow students to take the lead in the classroom because it is a low stakes environment.  How do you give them choice? Allow them to pick the greeting or share. You can even have them choose the order (although I do not suggest doing this daily).

Why You Should Be Implementing Morning Meetings

Starting to include morning meetings in your practice is a fantastic way to strengthen classroom dynamics and support academic performance. 

This routine helps:

• Set a positive tone for the rest of the school day.
• Build a strong classroom community.
• Provide opportunities for reflection, collaboration, and growth.

It’s also an incredible way to build trust with your students. In my practice, morning meeting was always a way for me to get to know my students a bit deeper and learn more about what drives them. We laughed a lot and I always looked at it as a supportive tool to build connection, rather than a way to teach more skills. Of course, plenty of skills were taught and learned, but that trust piece is crucial to setting the stage for learning. 

Morning meetings are one of the ways to build relationships, which can sometimes be difficult for some students. It is a low stress way to slowly develop relationships with some of your more challenging kids. Believe it or not, but morning meetings can actually decrease behavior for many different reasons, but the main one being that you develop relationships.

How to Implement a Morning Meeting

What Is the Format?

Like I shared earlier, a typical morning meeting consists of four key components:

Greeting: Everyone starts the day by saying hello and greeting each other by name.

Sharing: Students take turns sharing something about their lives while the rest of the group listens, asks questions, or adds friendly comments.

Group Activity: The whole class joins in a quick, fun activity like a game, a song, or a poem. It’s a great way to build teamwork and practice new skills.

Morning Message: Students read a short note from the teacher that sets the tone for the day and gives a sneak peek at what they’ll be working on.

Don’t get hung up on this part if this is new to you. A greeting can be simplified to a wave, or flourish into an elaborate handshake. You can choose the greeting, or have students pick each day. It’s all up to you!

A bit more on the flexible piece below.

How to Have Flexibility

Morning meetings should adapt to the needs of your students and schedule. 

For example, upper elementary students might benefit from more detailed discussions, while younger students will thrive on movement-based activities. Flexibility ensures that your morning meeting routine remains engaging and purposeful for the group of students you’re serving.

It is also okay for them to be longer some days and shorter on others. There would be times as a class we needed to debrief something going on in the classroom, we had to practice a routine, or we just got talking and it was double to normal amount of time. Other days, we did a speed meeting but we ALWAYS made time for one no matter what.

Don’t be afraid to trash something that isn’t working, either. For a while, my students were struggling with the activity piece. It became utter chaos. So, I dialed it down and focused on individual activities that were part of something larger, like coloring one piece of a bigger picture. They were still working “together,” but they were doing it at their own areas so we didn’t keep running into trouble. After a week of this, we were able to restructure our meeting to include a group activity.

You’ll get the feel for how to shift and change the routine based on what your kids need on any given day, which you do in your special education classroom daily anyway!

What Should Be Different About Morning Meetings for the End of the Year?

The end of the school year is a special time to reflect, celebrate, and prepare for transitions. Morning meetings during this period should include reflection and fun questions that encourage students to:

• Recall their favorite things about the school year.
• Acknowledge their growth and accomplishments.
• Look forward to the start of the school year ahead.

You don’t necessarily have to scrap everything in your morning meeting routine, but the end of the year is a great time to get a little more reflective and ask more open-ended questions. 

One thing it shouldn’t be? A count down until the end of the year. Want to learn why? Read this blog post all about why you should not be doing countdowns.

Why Change Anything?

Changing the structure or focus of your morning meetings at the end of the year helps:

• Create space for meaningful discussion about the year’s experiences.
• Foster a sense of closure as students prepare for the coming year.
• Celebrate the unique journey of your class.

This could mean adding in one simple question to the whole group at the end of your meeting, including a new section inside your existing meeting, or a combination of both. The important thing is that we’re allowing students to look back on their year and offer them a place to share their growth and ideas for next year. 

The Importance of Reflecting on the School Year

Reflection is a critical skill that promotes self-awareness and growth. By encouraging students to reflect on their proudest moments, hardest things, and lessons learned, you help them build a better understanding of themselves and their potential.

This is especially important in the special education classroom because a lot of our students have big hurdles to overcome. If we completely bypass their hard work and success without truly acknowledging it, we’re not doing our jobs. 

We want to highlight the hard parts so students know that they overcame tough moments, We want to celebrate with them about the big things they’ve done and learned to grow throughout the year. 

How to Build in Ideas for Kids to Learn How to Reflect on Their Year

These are just some ideas on how to implement more reflection in your morning meeting. Use specific morning meeting prompts and activities to guide students in their reflection and scaffold the question along the way.

You can try:

• Journaling about their favorite memory or most interesting thing they learned.
• Sharing something they taught a good friend or younger self by writing down the steps they taught them (this is my favorite thing to see).
• Creating a “yearbook” of highlights as a group project.

These are all wonderful ways to get students working together and truly feeling the spirit of the end of the year. If you want to do something a little faster, you may want to incorporate some of these questions below. 

Questions to Ask During Your Morning Meeting at the End of the Year

These can be used as a question of the day and are a fun way to spark meaningful discussions about the end of the year. 

Here are some ideas for you to try:

1. What is your favorite memory of this year?
2. What was a challenge you overcame?
3. What’s something you’re still working on?
4. Did you make any new friends this year?
5. How well did you work with your teacher?
6. Was there a new thing you learned that you’re good at?
7. What’s something you did to help a friend?
8. Did you teach someone how to do something?
9. Did you have a proud moment?
10. What was the most fun thing you did?
11. What book was your favorite?
12. How were you helpful this year?
13. What is your favorite subject, sport, or song?
14. What field trip was the most exciting?
15. What do you hope you’ll do again next year?

How to Modify the Questions for Students Having a Tough Time

Remember, not all students find it easy to answer questions in general, let alone reflecting on them. 

Here are some ways to support them:

• Use leading questions, like, “I remember you did a great job on your science project. How did that feel?”
• Share observations: “I noticed you worked hard to help a classmate with math. Tell us about that.”
• Offer choices: “Which did you like more, the field trip or the art project?”

We know our students so well, so this is an easy step in helping bridge the gap between a really tough concept and meaningful shares.

Other Ideas for Integrating These Questions into Morning Meeting

Even though morning meetings are meant to be more fun and less academic-feeling, students may still have a tough time and not want to engage at all.

To make the process a little more engaging, try:

• Pulling Questions from a Hat: Write questions on slips of paper and let students pick one to answer.
• Using a Digital Component: Create a slideshow with fun questions or a video game-style spinner to select prompts.
• Offering lots choice: Where they want to sit, what question they want to answer, who goes first, etc.

The end of the school year is a fantastic time to reflect, celebrate, and prepare for what’s next. 

When we incorporate end of year reflection questions in our fun morning meeting activities, we create a meaningful experience that helps students build social-emotional skills, strengthen classroom bonds, and appreciate their journey. 

Whether you’re teaching upper elementary students, middle schoolers, or high schoolers, these strategies provide a great way to end the year on a positive and impactful note.

Have fun, get creative, and remember the goal is always to remind students how far they’ve come.