Hi friends!
I’ve been wanting to share some of the things I do with my kids during our morning “circle time” but just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Now that more people are home with their kids due to the school closings I thought now would be a good time to share in case you need some ideas.
These ideas are for circle time with little kiddos – preschool, kindergarten, and maybe early elementary age.
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What is circle time?
Circle time is a group learning time, usually in a traditional preschool or kindergarten classroom.
Since I’m doing K5 at home with Caleb this year, I thought that having a morning “circle time” with all three of my kids would be a good way to start things off each day.
I’ve also seen moms call it morning time or talk about gathering some fun learning tools together in a morning basket.
Ideas for morning circle time at home
Here are some of the things that I like to do with my kids during our morning circle time at home. Note that we do NOT do every single one of these activities every day.
Bible memorization
Kids have such a capacity for memorization! Repeat a verse every day and pretty soon they’ll have it memorized – it’s as easy as that.
While we haven’t done as much memorization as we probably should, we’ve done several short passages (Psalm 23, Psalm 100) and multiple individual verses.
Pledge or other memorization
Morning circle time is also a great time to recite the pledge of allegiance or to work on other memorization. I have this old book, Poems for Memorization, that I plan to eventually use to choose some good poems for the kids.
Singing
Singing together with your kids is so important, even if you don’t feel like you’re the best singer.
And, since we were talking about memorization a minute ago, keep in mind that songs are one of the easiest way to memorize things!
Some of the songs we’ve enjoyed singing together are various hymns, the days of the week (sung to the tune of Yankee Doodle), the months of the year (sung to the tune of Michael Finnegan), and more.
Bible story/lesson
Most days Pablo does a little Bible time with the kids before he goes to work, but on the days that he doesn’t I try to add this to our morning circle time.
These are the Bible story books we currently have:
The Bible in Pictures for Little Eyes – This one is super simple for little ones.
The Beginner’s Bible – Love how many Bible stories are included in this one!
The Jesus Storybook Bible – Not as many Bible stories in this one, but they’re a bit lengthier and do a great job at pointing forward to Christ, our rescuer.
The Picture Bible – This one is in the format of a graphic novel – very well done, appropriate for kids, and super detailed!
Make-believe scenarios / obedience practice
The kids think it’s fun when I make something up and we practice what they should do in that particular scenario.
We’ll talk about things like what they should do if they get separated from me. They know that they can always ask for help from a policeman/fireman, a store employee, or a mom with her kids.
Another thing that we’ll do is I’ll ask them to do random, silly things in order to practice listening and obeying. We’ll talk about how they should respond if they really don’t want to clean up but I asked them to. That sort of thing.
We don’t do this every day but honestly should do it more often because practicing right behavior when you’re not in the heat of the moment is really helpful.
Flashcards
Not much explanation needed here! We have alphabet flashcards, shape and color flashcards, etc. We also have some fun ones that I found at Target Dollar Spot like dinosaurs and the US Presidents.
Learning videos on YouTube
This is (of course) my kids’ favorite part of circle time haha. Here are a few of our favorite videos currently:
My kids love this video – and thanks to watching it a million times my 20 month old already knows a lot of his letter sounds!
Caleb is super interested in the planets right now and quickly learned their names and basic facts from this song (plus a few other planet songs we discovered.)
I had never heard this song before but apparently it’s something of a classic. At any rate, after watching it daily for a couple weeks my kids could easily sing the names of all fifty states. (Now to learn to identify them by their shapes!)
Another fun state song and this one includes the capitols which is nice. My kids think it’s hilarious too since it’s by Wakko from the Animaniacs.
Well, that’s everything I can think of that we do for our morning circle time at home! I know it will change and evolve as the kids get older. The main point of it though – learning together as a group – will stay the same.
If you homeschool or stay home with your younger-than-school-age kids, do you have a morning “circle time” or something similar? I’d love to hear what you do so please share in the comments!
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