Whether you are a homeschooler and having morning time or using a morning basket, or you are in a classroom and doing circle time and calendar time it is important to practice calendar skills. One of my more favorite times of the day when I was still in the classroom was circle time. We used the opportunity to practice things like calendar, counting, colors, shapes, and identifying the weather and so many more wonderful things. Now as a homeschool mama, I still love doing circle time with my kids. While it looks a bit different than when I was teaching in the classroom, I still love this time with my kids. We use our circle time board to practice all of our focus skills and have recently added on our
Morning Time Notebook activities to coordinate. We look forward to starting each day with our Circle Time activities.
Circle Time & Calendar Board
After our Bible time, we move to our
Circle time board or Morning Time Notebook and will begin talking about our different focus skills for the week. When my kids were younger we had more emphasis on things like letters, numbers, shapes, and colors. As they have gotten older, we focus our attention on calendar skills and recording the date. Our entire circle time board comes from the
Circle Time Focus Board kit.
We first started using our Circle Time Board when my daughter was 2.5. She absolutely LOVED doing activities and wanted more and more and I wanted to encourage that with her. We kept things super low key for circle time at that age and spent maybe 5 minutes tops. As we practiced and use the board more we got into more of a rhythm with using it and it became our absolute favorite.
As toddlers and preschoolers, during circle time we talked about our different focus skills: letter, number, shape, and color of the week plus discussing the daily weather and temperature, learning to spell their names, phone numbers & address.The more we practiced the more the kids got into it and wanted to do more of it. Some days we found ourselves spending our entire school day just doing our circle time board because they loved it so much.
I used items from my
Calendar Pack resource to create a trifold board for our display. I wanted this resource to be able to be moved around and to leave more homeschool room wall space for other things so I used the trifold board which works perfectly for this. All items in our Pack were sized to fit onto a 48"x36" trifold board, but they can also be added to a bulletin board or other wall display.
All of our laminated pieces are attached to our trifold board with
velcro dots and each of the cards are attached to the “plaques” are attached with
velcro dots as well ,which helps to make our circle time board very interactive and hands on.
It is not shown, but there is space at the bottom of our trifold board that has allowed our board to grow with us as we add more skills we need to learn and practice.
Circle Time Board Files
You can get the full Circle Time Board kit by clicking on the picture or links below or on any of the pictures above.
Additional Morning Meeting Activities
As the kids have gotten older, we have incorporated other activities into our Morning Time activities that better meet there needs. One of those resource is our Morning Time Notebook set that coordinates with our Circle Time Board. We do a mix of our morning time notebook and our calendar board. They are meant to go together or be used separately.
In addition, both of my kids are working on becoming more fluent with their math facts so I whipped up some Addition and Subtraction and Multiplication and Division Fluency Notebooks. We bound our separately, but they are meant to be used as an add-on to our Morning Time Notebook File.
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Thank you!! We are homeschooling for the first year this year, and my son is going to love this!
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