Morning Message Routine: 3 Big Benefits

Looking back, a Morning Message Routine was one of the most joyful parts of my teaching day. There was something so special about gathering together, reading aloud, and connecting over a shared message—it brought community, engagement, and literacy learning to life right from the start of each day.

This simple routine helped my students build essential early literacy skills like directionality, letter recognition, word boundaries, and one-to-one tracking. It also gave me daily opportunities to model writing conventions like punctuation, capitalization, and high-frequency words. Most of all, it made reading and writing feel exciting, purposeful, and fun—every single day.

Whether you write a Morning Message on chart paper, a whiteboard, or an interactive display, your Morning Message routine is a golden opportunity to reinforce key print concepts while building classroom community.

In my classroom, our Morning Message routine was our special way to start our day! Each morning my students were greeted with a short teacher-written message. The message always included: the date, a friendly greeting, and a preview of something exciting happening in our classroom; a special activity, a new learning focus, or a shout-out to celebrate students.

Our Morning Message routine built literacy skills, community, and engagement! Below you will find six print concept strategies to enhance your Morning Message Routine!

Track Print to Reinforce Directionality

Set the stage before reading the message by asking your students:
Where do we start reading?
What do we do when we get to the end of the line?
What do you notice about the spaces between words?

As you read, model tracking the text with your finger, a pointer, or a fun tool like a mini flashlight. Modeling directionality helps students develop left-to-right tracking, return sweep, and one-to-one correspondence, all crucial early reading skills!

As children become more aware of print concepts, ask a child to use a pointer with one section while everyone reads together. Watching how children track print is a useful, informal assessment that gauges your children’s understanding and determines next steps for children’s reading instruction.

Highlight Letters and Words in Playful Ways

Make the Morning Message routine interactive by inviting children to find specific letters, high-frequency words, or punctuation marks.

Three skills to include based on your students’ needs:
Letter Hunts: “Find all the ‘T’s in today’s message.”
Can you find a T at the beginning, the end, or in the middle of a word?
Word Hunts: “Can you circle the word ‘the’?”
Punctuation Detectives: “Who sees a question mark? Why is it there?” 

These questions engage students while strengthening letter recognition, sight word knowledge, and punctuation awareness.  Another fun way to keep the children involved during your Morning Message routine is to have a designated action to do for a given word when re-reading the Morning Message.  While reading, children could jump up or clap when the word was read.   

Emphasize Spaces Between Words

For emerging readers, distinguishing spaces and words in a sentence is key. Use the Morning Message routine to highlight and focus on word boundaries:
Draw circles around or highlight spaces between words.
Use a popsicle stick or finger to “hop” between words.
Clap for each word as you read the sentence aloud.

My children loved gluing brown pompoms (meatballs) in between words to demonstrate the meatball spaces between words in one sentence. They also placed thin pipe cleaners (spaghetti) to show the spaces within words. Helping students see and feel word boundaries supports fluency and comprehension.

Model Writing and Sentence Structure

When your Morning Message Routine includes writing your message in front of students (or revealing a prewritten message one word at a time) it helps children see how sentences are formed. As you share, think aloud about:
Capitalization: “I start my sentence with a capital letter.”
Spacing: “Watch how I leave a little space between each word.”
Ending Punctuation: “I’m using an exclamation mark because I’m excited!”

This explicit modeling reinforces sentence structure and writing conventions naturally during your Morning Message routine.

Add Predictable Sentences for Participation

Young learners thrive on repetition and familiarity. Try predictable sentence starters like:
“Today is _____.”
“We will _____.“
“Our helper today is ______.“

Let students chime in to finish sentences, write missing words, or illustrate the message. This builds confidence and encourages early writing attempts.

Include Multi-Sensory Experiences in Your Morning Message Routine!

To keep things fresh, try incorporating:
Singing the Message: Turn your message into a song or chant.

Read in different voices: By far my children loved reading in the tiny, squeaky mouse voice and vampire voice the best. 

Cut-Up Sentences: Write the message on sentence strips. Pass out the cards from the cut-up sentence.  Have children come up and place their card over the matching word.

Rainbow Writing: Have children trace key letters or words with different colors.  This activity was done whole group, with one child searching and finding one letter or one word. 

Make Your Morning Meeting Routine Meaningful All Year Long

Morning Message is a fun and engaging way to build print awareness each school day. Whether you’re just starting to implement a Morning Message routine or looking for new ways to enhance it, the key is to make it purposeful, engaging, and fun.  By making small adjustments, like adding interactive elements, focusing on specific literacy skills, or incorporating student ideas, you can keep your Morning Message routine fresh and meaningful all year long.  Your children will look forward to participating each morning, and you’ll love watching their reading, writing, and confidence grow!

Related Posts and Products

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