The tendency is to think that the main focus of circletime (or large group time) should be for giving instruction or for teaching. However, the real focus of circletime is to build a strong sense of community.Â
Circletime is used to do routine activities like the “helper of the day,” games, music, movement, and story telling but along the way, it is important to mindful of how circletime is helping everyone get to know each other and work together to have a great experience.
Here are some examples of what circletime looks like...
I can day in preschool : circletime
Exploring “I Can Day” during our first week of preschool gave us the opportunity to discover many of the things we can do in preschool!
The tools we use in preschool
For our very first day of preschool, we jumped right in and explored the tools we use in preschool. The “teaching” goal of our day
The art of music in preschool
Exploring the sounds of music in a most unusual way in our preschool classroom…
The listening game and celebrating National Book Week 2012
Enjoying the wonderful book “The Listening Walk” by Paul Showers and playing a super silly listening game!
Building block literacy and story telling
Building our own stories through block play in circletime…
Exploring seeds in the gardening center
Exploring seeds in circle time and in our cardboard box gardening center…
Exploring Dr. Seuss stripes in preschool…
Counting and creating with our Dr. Seuss stripes in our prek classroom!
Exploring penguins in preschool
Using our new issue of Scholastic Classroom Magazine to help us explore all about penguins!
Candy cane math in pre-k
We had fun doing a little candy cane math and designing in pre-k!
Ring those bells in preschool
Listening with our ears and singing together as we explored bells today in preschool!
Charting out our Thanksgiving meal in preschool
Charting out our Thanksgiving meal and place settings in circle time!
Very busy making spider webs in preschool
We were busy little spiders today as we spent our day exploring spiders and weaving our very own spider webs in preschool!
Exploring upper and lowercase letters with my preschoolers
Exploring upper and lower case letters with my preschoolers…
In the News: Telling a story right out of the bag in preschool
Using a story telling bag is a terrific way to promote language and literacy skills in preschool!