2/23/2027

Morning Announcements

Morning Meeting Agenda

Mon · Social Studies Tue · Literacy Wed · Science Thu · Math Fri · ROAR + Houses
Literacy of the Day

Some stories live in people, not books

Before a story is written down, it lives in somebody’s memory. And when that person is gone, the story can disappear forever — unless somebody writes it down first.

Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston Photo credit: [add if license requires]

Meet Zora Neale Hurston! As a girl she sat by the town store and listened to grown-ups tell stories. She loved them so much that when she grew up, her JOB was to travel around and collect stories so they’d never be lost!

Word of the Day: COLLECT. To collect means to gather things and keep them safe. Zora collected stories!

Zora listened to stories, wrote them down, and saved them in books
Let’s talk
  • Who in YOUR family tells the best stories?
  • What happens to a story if nobody ever writes it down or tells it again?
  • What’s a story you’ve heard so many times you know it by heart?
Reveal a fun factHide the fact
In Zora’s hometown, people called their tall tales “big old lies” — not because they were bad, but because they were wonderfully exaggerated and fun! She wrote hundreds of them down.
Try it

Be a story collector! Turn to a partner and tell them one true thing that happened to you this week. Then LISTEN carefully to theirs. Can you retell their story back to them?

Mystery writer: She grew up in Eatonville, Florida — the first incorporated, self-governing all-Black town in America. As a child she sat outside the general store listening to neighbors trade tall tales. Then she went to college, studied anthropology, and came back with a notebook.

Who is she?Hide
Portrait of Zora Neale Hurston Photo credit: [add if license requires]
Zora Neale Hurston — novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist, and a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance. She traveled the American South and the Caribbean recording folktales, songs, and oral histories from working-class Black communities, and wrote the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Here’s what made her unusual. Most scholars of her era studied famous people and famous events. Hurston went to porches, work camps, and general stores — and treated ordinary people’s stories as worth saving.

Whose stories get written down: usually the famous and powerful, but Hurston recorded farmers, workers, neighbors, and grandmothers
Let’s talk
  • Why would folktales passed down by word of mouth be in danger of disappearing?
  • Hurston died in 1960 with no money, and was buried in an unmarked grave. Her books went out of print. What does that say about how easily even important people can be forgotten?
  • In 1973, the writer Alice Walker searched for that grave, found it, and bought a headstone. Why would one writer do that for another?
Reveal the answersHide the answers
Oral stories survive only as long as someone remembers and retells them — one generation that doesn’t pass them on, and they’re gone. Hurston spent her life preventing that, then nearly vanished herself. Alice Walker put a headstone on her grave reading “A Genius of the South,” then wrote an essay about the search — and Hurston’s books came back into print. Walker explained it simply: “A people do not throw their geniuses away.” The story collector needed someone to collect her.
Try it

Do Hurston’s job! Interview someone in your family this week — a grandparent if you can — and write down one story they tell in their own words, not yours. That’s exactly what she did. You’re saving something.

Additional Notes/Activities

If additional activities are needed for the Morning Meeting, they will be added here.