Why A Morning Work Alternative?
What Are the Procedures of a Morning Work Alternative?
When the timer goes off, I set the timer again for 2 minutes. Students know they have to work together as a team to clean up and be on the carpet by the end of the 2 minutes. If a table has not synergized, they lose the privilege of participating in morning tubs the next day. Three weeks in, this has never happened. My friends really treasure Morning Tubs.
What is the Teacher Doing During Morning Tubs?
Great question! During morning tubs, I always take Attendance on Infinite Campus and check the turn-it-in tray. Earlier in January when first introducing morning tubs, I spent a lot of time playing with my friends modeling kind social interactions. Now, if specifically asked or needed, I will join our morning-tub time, which I love doing. BUT 8 minutes, is just the right amount of time I need to read with a friend. My friends LOVE getting to new reading levels and it’s been a wonderful structure to encourage me to read with a friend each morning.
What Have Been the Benefits of Doing Morning Work Alternatives?
- My friends have started thinking outside the box with the materials. Base 10 pieces are logs and phonics dominoes are a card tower. All the ways they want to play with reading and math manipualtives during reading and math, they now have a devoted time to do so.
- Student walk in the door excited to get started. Morning tubs have minimized our morning routine. Students don’t want to waste any time making lunch choices, putting away their folders, or stowing their backpacks because they know their time is already limited.
- After playing and talking and laughing, my friends come to the carpet and are ready to learn. Our first Daily 5 choices have been out-of-the-world lately.
- We’ve become a *little* more flexible. While I love morning tubs (and my 1st graders do too), sometimes it isn’t possible. We need to start early or there has been a change in the schedule. When that happens, we’ve learned to say – “Oh well!” It’s a special treat when morning tubs happen, but not expected.
Where Do I Get the Tubs?
Several years ago I feel in love with this clip top Sterilite tubs. They make the PERFECT storage container…so much so that I wrote a whole post about them here. I use these medium clip-top bins for morning tub bins. They are much smaller than the large bins and SUPER deep. They are perfect for storing lots of manipualtives, cards, or materials. You can snag the labels FREE here.
What’s In Our Morning Tubs?
Our morning tubs are filled with lots of manipualtives (reading and math). While students are ‘playing’, they are also engaging with academic tools in a non-threatening way. They have the chance to explore new words with our phonics dice, they can make silly sentences with our sentence puzzles, create words with our letter tiles, conjure difficult math problems with the base ten pieces, and create 16-sided shapes with our geoboards.
Through Donors Choose I requested this low shelf that stores our morning tubs and indoor recess items. I love having one space where the bins are so students can grab them and go!
We have A LOT of building resources in our tubs. While this can quickly branch into “indoor recess” type of material, students still don’t have full recess range of freedoms. Additionally, when students build, create, and collaborate they are active, talking, and building relationships. We love Tinker Toys because we can create spinning and moving machines!
Interlox are also a class favorite. At first my friends struggled with them because their natural reaction is to build up. Students quickly learn that if they only build up, their towers will topple. By building wide and creating a strong base, students learn that they can create intricate buildings with these tools!
MagnaTiles are THE favorite material in our morning tubs. These magnetic building blocks are amazing and students can create almost anything they want. From 2D shapes to mazes to 3D masterpieces, MagnaTiles are pretty awesome! With that said, they are incredibly expensive (thanks, Donors Choose!) and they are a beast to clean-up. Still, childhood joy and excitement wins, so the MagnaTiles stay!
My 1st graders also LOVE Story Cubes. Each set of cubes has a different theme (verbs, ways to move, places to visit). Students role 2-3 of the dice and combine them into a story. These dice are perfect for adding excitement to writing and build a nice bridge to work on writing!
Reuse, Reuse, Reuse
While our classroom has been blessed with lots of Morning Tub choices from Donors Choose, yard sales, and family donations, I routinely use materials I am also using for reading and math. Just starting with Morning Tubs? Check out some of my go-to tub items! 
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Since Morning Tubs take place before school starts, yes we also have indoor recess on tough weather days! During indoor recess, students get choice of their tubs, their locations, and there are more choices. During indoor recess, we have Go Noodle, art station, larger building toys, and I pull out my class-set of board games. Additionally, during indoor recess, students can trade centers any time.
Hey Sherry! Typically the first few days of school we do foam shapes with shape mats. This is simple and doesn’t have to be explained. I like to start Morning Tubs the first full week of school once I can explain procedures!
There are 4-6 students at each of my tables. Students must stay at their tables since I have picked their spot specifically (who I want them to build relationships with).
Hey Lisa! I’ve shared more about those tools here: http://brownbagteacher.com/morning-tub-ideas/
Typically I change out materials on Monday mornings. I’ll keep something in for 1-3 weeks but at least 2-3 tubs are new each week. Things reappear in our morning tubs at least 2-3 times a year!
Honestly, I haven’t. Early on I established that during morning tubs, the materials are tools for play and exploring. During math/reading, they are tools for learning. If we get mixed up then they have to stay tools for learning and that’s no fun!
They can make our traditional morning tub choices – reading, writing, completing classroom tasks (assigned by me).
I’ll put coins, texture blocks, and leaves (at different times) into the bins!
As a parent, as well as a teacher-in-training, this post makes me feel like crying. My son just finished first grade and he hated that morning work worksheet so much. He is one of the most naturally curious, enthusiastic people I know, but he now thinks of himself as someone who is always bored. “Other people get excited. I’m more like Garfield,” he says. But this is NOT who he is – this is just how school has made him feel. The crux of it all was the morning work. He dreaded getting up because he had to school, and dreaded going to school because of the morning work. Then there would often be discipline and emails home from the teacher because he wasn’t focusing on the morning work. After that, he says, the day got better – but as his parent, I say that’s a lot of very rough mornings. It’s summer and we’re trying to help our son have a “detox” with hands-on activities and social, artistic fun to renew his curiosity, and it’s already helping him be so much more like his old self. I wish I had engaged with his teacher more on the morning work issue, though. I thought it was just a modern necessity – every classroom seems to have it, and I thought I’d be a squeaky wheel for suggesting that my kid couldn’t or shouldn’t be asked to do what every other kid seems to be finding success with. But morning tubs? So brilliant, so worthwhile, such a clear and meaningful alternative. You are showing me that there is nothing sacred about the morning worksheet. I think my son would have thrived in your classroom. Thank you for your great work.
I introduced flexible seating and the morning tubs this year. Love both but they don’t have aassigned seats so they can select a center and then write it on a card so they are sure to swap each day. Still some issues with sharing and interacting nicely but it’s been a great alternative andnsomething I hope to expand on next year.
I love the fact that your morning tubs are quick and also geared toward helping your friends improve their social skills. I think with the amount of testing that kids undergo nowadays we tend to push play aside for the sake of getting to everything in our pacing guides or lesson plans. So I love your few minutes a day to give the kids time to play and work on their social skills. Thanks for sharing!
I Love everything that you do! What do the kids do if they cannot participate in morning tubs because they didn’t clean or argued?
And what do you do for rubbings?
I’m a new teacher and I love your blog! I teach first grade this year too and try to use some of the things I see here, although as a new teacher I think you understand how difficult it might be.. I love this idea on the place of morning work! So is it basically “educational game”? I have a ton of word and math games I suspect I could use for this!!
Hey Katherine! They are called Phonics Tiles and can be found on Amazon. 🙂
I love these ideas. I teach Kindergarten and use morning tubs to help develop fine motor skills. All of my tubs have a fine motor focus for developing pencil grasp, hand strength, dexterity etc. When time permits we also do some finger gym exercises when tubs are packed up. My kids love it and they get a chance to have a chat while I’m marking the roll and doing any last minute prep. They unpack much quicker and quieter so they can get more time with the tubs and are ready to listen and learn when they get to the mat after pack away time.