French Morning Work

French Morning Work is kind of fancy name for something quite simple: activities for students to do as soon as they’re ready to start their school day.

Or better yet, activities to get them ready to start their school day.

Some people call it “bell work”, “bell ringers”, “do now”, or “warm-up”.

No matter how you call it, though, the principle is still the same: making your students more focused and engaged from the moment they enter the classroom.

French Morning Work: Benefits

– creating a routine

– fostering independence

– improving focus and engagement

– reviewing / practicing important skills

French Morning Work: Implementation

If you’ve never used it in your classroom, you might want to start slowly by giving lots of instructions and establishing morning work procedures.

If you decide to create a monthly morning work booklet, you’ll have to make it very clear that they have to work with the sheets in the order in which you have assembled the pages.

Instruct them to grab their morning work booklets as soon as they are ready to start the day (after having taken their coats off, put their backpacks away – whatever it is that your students do as they arrive).

The idea is for them to work through a page a day. Of course, that’s only the idea because kids work at different paces, so some will still be doing the exercises while others will have already finished.

That’s ok!

Keep the unfinished work for any free time they get during the day or assign it as homework. You could also have the early-finishers help others if you believe that kind of collaboration would work in your classroom.

If you decide not to use the morning work sheets as a booklet, create a designated area where you’ll be keeping the worksheets so that students know where to grab them to start working.

The first month will be the most important as kids will need lots of instruction and help understanding what each exercise is about.

The following months should be easier as most of the exercises will follow a repeated structure, with changes only in the theme, e.g. fall, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, etc.

While your students are doing their morning work, you can use the time to take attendance and do other important “first thing in the morning” kind of tasks.