Morning meeting slides that need no prep

Search for morning meeting slides and you get templates: a greeting box, a share box, an activity box, a message box, and a new one to fill in every night. They look organised. They are also the reason most people stop in November.

The version that survives a school year has one image and one question on it, and takes no preparation at all.

Which means the only real decision is what the image is. It has to carry an idea on its own, from the back of the room, in about two seconds. That is what the Classroom Collection is: twenty lessons, each one a visual with the questions and the deck already built. You can try one free before deciding whether it is worth the rest.

What actually belongs on the slide

• •One image, large. Big enough to read from the back. It is the thing that gets attention while people are still sitting down.
• •One question, in full. Written out, not abbreviated. Children who need a second to read it get that second, and you are not repeating yourself.
• •Nothing else. No date, no agenda, no learning objective. Every extra element is one more thing to update tonight.

That is the whole design. The restraint is the feature: a slide you can reuse with a different image takes fifteen seconds to change, and a slide that takes fifteen seconds to change actually gets changed.

Why one image beats four boxes

A busy slide splits attention at exactly the moment you are trying to gather it. Thirty children reading four boxes are doing four different things.

An image does something a text box cannot: it gives the children who are not ready to talk something to look at. In a circle, having somewhere to put your eyes is the difference between joining in and waiting for it to be over.

A week of slides

Themed days do most of the work of keeping it going, because you stop deciding what to do each morning.

1. 1.Monday, arrival. One word for how you are arriving. Fast, round the circle, no follow-up.
2. 2.Tuesday, would you rather. Two options on the image, hands up on three, two people say why.
3. 3.Wednesday, the picture. What is going on here? Longest one of the week, five minutes.
4. 4.Thursday, other people. A question about someone else. Who helped you, who did you notice.
5. 5.Friday, back at it. What went better this week than last week?

Editable or ready-made

Editable decks sound better and get used less. The editing is the work, and the work is what you do not have time for at 8:15.

A ready-made deck you swap one image in is faster than a template you fill in. If you do want to edit, edit once at the start of a half term rather than nightly.