Circle time

[zen39]

My little ones love circle time and most of them are little, 13 months, (2) 18 months and 2.5 year old. As soon as they hear my little bell ring, the 18 months old say circle...and they come sit on my carpet. I've never made any child have to sit, if they choose to wander around, that was fine by me...but all of my kids come to circle even the 12 month old...i think she sees the others and now she too enjoys the time spent there.

I have a puppet that always starts off circle time and sings to them and gives each of them a hug and kiss...they especially love this.

We do a little felt board story and sing a song and that's it. Very short.

So I'm completely for circle time at this age...if you make it short, interesting and fun...any child will enjoy it.

We keep it really short but fun. I do a calendar. They love to help point to the numbers, they each take turns sticking on the day. For the weather, we put pretend binoculars to our face to look out the window. The young ones just enjoy making funny faces when i say is it snowing today? And we scrunch up our face and say "no it's not snowing today".

I've often found that it's me getting up from the floor first and not them, sometimes they sit there wanting another felt board story...they really enjoy those.

[playfelt]

For younger kids that don't really sit for circletime remember that it doesn't all have to be done in a block of time. Spend 5 minutes reading a story and then singing a song or doing a fingerplay related to the story then send them off to play again. Later call them all to the feltboard for some rhymes and then send them off to play again, set up a group game and then gather everyone to play. A circletime done in 4x5 minute segments has more meaning than a 20 minute block to the little ones. I tend to do a concept at each one so one session might be reading a story about insects and then singing itsy bitsy spider with actions, another would be a shape matching file folder game but me supervised so no one chews on the pieces, another session would be at the feltboard doing counting, sorting, matching, a short story, etc. I look for opportunities to do the "lesson" where they are playing so learning the skill of sorting/matching one to one correspondance can be done in the kitchen area making sure there is a matching cup for each saucer or dividing up a board into rectangles and making sure there is a hot wheels car parked in each spot. We count the cars, name their colours, decide which row has the most cars in it. All of the same skills we would be trying to teach in a formal sit down circletime but they are learned in the middle of play instead.