Hip Homeschol Hop 11/16/2010
Today I’d like to tell you a little bit about our morning Circle Time. I do Circle Time with both of my girls, ages 5 and 3. Being a former preschool teacher I love Circle Time. We begin each morning sitting on the floor in a circle and begin our school day.
This is what our Circle Time area looks like:
We, obviously, sit on the floor in front of this wall where our calendar is.
For the first couple of months we started out our day praying (in THIS school we can still pray!! Can I get an “amen”?? 
) ) and then said “The Pledge of Allegiance” and ” Pledge To The Bible” so my girls would learn it. Now that it’s become a by rote activity and my girls have learned those pledges we have taken a break from saying the pledges. (Is that unpatriotic??) I want it to be meaningful to them and not boring.
Then we rotate between two “Good Morning”songs before we say our weekly Bible verse. Each week we do a Bible verse that follows the alphabet. This week we are doing the letter “I”. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”. I got this idea from Impress Your Kids. org. I don’t always use the same verses she does but it’s a jumping off point for me.
After the weekly Bible verse we have our Bible story. I’ve mentioned before that I felt that the CLASS Bible story book that comes with the Kindergarten curriculum is too hard for Kindergartners, in my opinion. I found it boring and long. I could tell my girls quickly lost interest in the Bible lesson and that’s completely not the point of Bible lesson time. So I started improvising with my own Bible lessons. Right now I do lessons from DLTK. There’s usually a short lesson I can print out and coloring pages that go with it. I use the coloring pages as a visual and let my girls color the picture while I read the story. They really seem to enjoy this and are getting a lot more out of it. I hang up their coloring pictures on a wall dedicated to Bible story pictures. They love looking at what they’ve been doing.
On a side note, if you have any other great websites to take Bible lesson ideas from I’d love for you to leave the address in my comment section.
After we’re done with our Bible story we move on to our calendar. We talk about what month it is, what day of the week it is, how many days we are. We also discuss what yesterday was and what tomorrow will be. Calendar activities are actually great pre-math activities. It definitely reinforces counting skills.
If there’s a special date we’re looking forward to (like birthdays or Christmas) I’ll put a special date square on that spot and we’ll see how many days are left before that day comes.
You can find an assortment of cute preschool calendars at teacher stores.They usually come with extra date squares for birthdays, holidays, days off etc. I make and laminate my own, sometimes, if the calendar didn’t include one I want. Then I put a Velcro dot on the back.
I like to switch up our Circle Time activities so they don’t become too predictable or boring. When the new year starts we’ll start learning the months of the year and start doing weather. If we’re focusing on a special theme that week I try to have books on hold at the library that I can read during circle time. (Like Thanksgiving and Christmas ones). Or we might sing special songs. Circle Time is a great time to do music activities too. I just try to not make it too long. 10-15 minutes is plenty for Circle Time, in my opinion.
You can pretty much do whatever you want during Circle Time to make it fun. And it’s a great way to start your school day and make learning fun.
Do you do Circle Time?
This post is linked to the Hip Homeschool Hop hosted by The Homeschool Chick and The Tuckers Take Tennessee
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