Morning Message is a form of teacher demonstration with a strong emphasis on the use of context clues. It is also useful for teaching concepts of print. An important aspect of Morning Message is freshness or enjoyment. Vary the form of your messages often and keep them connected to the students' interests. Remember, you want to start the day with a strategy that invites alertness and full participation!

Morning Message

• Chalkboard and chalk
• Lots of ideas for messages related to children's lives and current interests.

1. Choose a topic and content for your Morning Message that reflects children's lives and interests, your own life, or classroom and community events.
2. Write 2-4 sentences on the topic in a prominent place on the chalkboard. Keep your sentences relatively short and vary their form. For example:
   • Guess who is 42 years old today!
   • Do you know anyone who has a birthday today?
     In order to establish the concept of sentence, sometimes make a sentence that is more than one line long. Do your students understand that it is the punctuation that denotes the end of the sentence?
3. The first time you use the strategy in a year, explain to the children that you will write them a message each day and that they should try to read it or predict what some of the words are as soon as they come in each day. Tell them you will be asking for their ideas about what it says as part of your morning routine (or afternoon routine in the case of pre-K and kindergarten afternoon classes).
4. When the class is settled, ask, "Does anyone see any words he/she can read in the Morning Message today?" If children know any of the words, ask them about what they think the message is. With young children, you might ask "Does anyone know any letters in our message this morning?" and invite them to circle and name letters that they know.
5. You would also demonstrate some concepts of print such as left to right and top to bottom sequencing, and read the sentences for the children (framing them as you do so). Ask questions and make comments such as the following.

   Sample Questions and Comments Who can show me where to start reading the Morning Message? (Give the child that volunteers a pointer to use.) How many sentences did I write today? How can you tell how many there are? Who can show us the first sentence? (Use the pointer.) Who can count the words in the first sentence? (Use the pointer.) How many letters are there in the first word of the Message? Use the pointer to show us how to count them. Which is the longest word I wrote today? The shortest word? What do we call this mark at the end of the sentence? Watch me while I read it to you. (Frame the words as you read.) (Stop at a word that children might be able to decode using syntactic knowledge and invite them to fill in the missing word. You might stop on the word old in the example above.) Ask, "Does the word old make sense there? Let's reread the sentence and see how it sounds."

6. After you have read the message to the class once, invite the children to reread the whole message with you.
7. When children have the idea that Morning Message makes sense and is related to their lives in some way (and have developed some sight vocabulary and knowledge of a few spelling patterns), turn more of the reading over to students. Make use of the Cloze strategy from time to time but do not leave too many words out. Leave whole words blank or include the first or last letter only.

1. Use a mystery word game.
   • Cover one word of the Morning Message with masking tape. When children come in, ask them to try and read the message and predict the mystery word.
   • Students can number a slip of paper or part of a page in a notebook from 1 to 3. Have them all write down one word. Remind them not to tell anyone what word they have predicted.
   • Read the message together, stopping at the mystery word and inviting a few children to reveal their predictions. Confirm predictions that would make sense in the sentence and write them on the board.
   • Uncover the first letter and ask, "Do any of the words that we predicted start like this? Which one/s?" Erase words on the board that do not start with that letter.
   • Invite everyone to make a second prediction by writing it beside the numeral 2. Add a few new predictions to the board. They must start with the letter that has been uncovered.
   • Continue to read the rest of the message. Ask children to predict the word based on the new information they have from knowing most of the message. Add new predictions. Uncover another letter and eliminate words that do not start with that pattern.
   • Invite children to write down their third prediction. They may write the same word each time if they feel that they predicted the right word from the beginning. Add new predictions.
   • Uncover all the letters and ask, "Who predicted our mystery word today? Who predicted other words that would make sense but are spelled differently?" Read the message using all the words that would make sense.
2. Teach students to focus on topic/context. Discuss with students about what Morning Messages usually are. Make a list of the main contexts that are used in Morning Messages. It might look like the following.

Morning Messages are about: the students in our class and their families. our teacher. something that is happening at school. something that is happening in ______ (name of village, town, city, etc. in which children live). a book we are reading or have read recently. something that is happening in the world.

Ask students to read as much of the message as they can and to predict which of these topics the message might be about that day. Remind students that, in attempting to read unfamiliar words, it always helps to know what the book or paragraph is about.

A major difference between the "Reading for Enjoyment" strategies and those of "Shared Reading" is that in the former you are reading to children while in the latter you are reading with them. While reading to children increases their active listening abilities, in shared reading you are encouraging students to become active readers.

Shared Reading

• Big Books and lap books ³⁷
• Class or small group sets of the same "easy to read" books
• Experience charts, charts, or overheads of favourite poems, songs, and chants.

1. Read the book, experience chart, or other text to the children right through from the beginning the first time it is used in order to keep the emphasis on meaning and enjoyment.
2. In subsequent rereadings, encourage children to join in the reading as they can. Use a pointer, your hand, or a framing device to help children follow.
3. Access children's problem-solving strategies and help them to decode unfamiliar words by using questions like the ones that follow.

   Questions to Ask when Reading or Rereading Books or Charts during Shared Reading* Before Reading About what is this text (chart/book/label)? Do you remember when we made it? Why we made it? (Establishing a context--accessing semantic and pragmatic knowledge) Where should we start in reading this text (chart/book/label)? (Accessing concepts of print) During Reading What might this word be? Let's read ahead and see if we can figure it out. Would ____ make sense here? (Accessing syntactic and semantic knowledge) What might this word be? Let's go back and read what came before and see if we can figure out what might work here. Does that sound right? (Accessing syntactic and semantic knowledge) Do we know any sounds in this word? What sound does it start with? End with? Yes, ___ (after child has volunteered a word) does begin with that letter. (Accessing graphophonic knowledge) Does ___ (teacher repeats the word) also make sense in the sentence? (Integrating cueing system knowledge) Do we know any other words that look like this? (Accessing graphophonic knowledge and structural clues--for example, compound words, word endings) * Make a set of cards that contain the questions on this chart for adult volunteers, parents, and older reading buddies to use when reading with children.

4. Go back and have children reread a section of text from the beginning whenever you feel the meaning may be lost.