I decided to incorporate Rusty’s videos into my morning meeting. We start with a greeting, then we watch Rusty and for share, we discuss the prompt that Rusty has given us. Then we complete a class challenge and that’s our morning meeting! 

Here’s how one of his videos goes! It only lasts about a minute but that minute is one of the most valuable ones of my day! 

“Hi and welcome back little diamonds!” Oh yeah… he calls the K-2 kids little diamonds and I just find it so adorable. My kids identify as diamonds. This year they declared that they are not little, just diamonds. Last year one of my students shaved a diamond into his hair for Rusty. I mean that is how much the kids love him!

After greeting the little diamonds he gives a shout out to one of his classes. My classes have died when we’ve gotten a shout out. Once they tried to get me to email it to all teachers so everyone would know. One year I had to play it during an assembly so the whole elementary could know about Rusty and our shout out. 

After the shout out Rusty shares the feeling word of the week. We made the feeling word part of our calendar and it is listed there along with a picture of the feeling. This has not only helped kids identify their feelings but it helped them as readers identifying character feelings.

Then Rusty gets down to business teaching a new skill. He might teach about not giving up when you’re frustrated, or why we walk in the halls at school, or how to notice when a friend is feeling sad. Then he gives a small piece of advice that kids can try out that day and he asks a question to push their thinking further. 

His videos then end with a poem. A poem that is the first poem we glue into our poetry notebooks and one that my diamonds recite with him each and every morning. 

After the poem, the question pops up on the screen and we move into a circle to share. Sometimes we make a quick anchor chart to remind us of Rusty’s words. Sometimes we set up a little challenge for ourselves based on what was said. We might even try to do something new depending on the topic of the video.