Circle time/calendar/morning meeting?

[Bearcat]

These all seem so very public schoolish yet I keep coming across homeschoolers who do these things. And they all seem so elaborate and time consuming. Big fancy boards with dozens of activities etc. Whatever math skills they may use like tallying and graphing they do in their regular math work already. The counting days and place value activities etc just seem so redundant as we learn all that during math as well. I can see tracking the weather during a study of weather or for a few weeks each season (my son did this for cub scouts once) but every day, all year?

Not necessarily criticizing, just curious why? And what the benefits are?

We do have what we call a morning basket. We do recitation, (they learn days of the week, month etc without all the extra fancy printables etc) timeline, picture study, play a thinking skills game, and read-a-loud.

I always thought one of the benefits of homeschooling was the fact that things can be streamlined and simplified. The big, fancy morning boards and binders etc just leave me scratching my head in wonder.

[Mandylubug]

We have a regular calendar on our wall. I write the date on the whiteboard and then move forward. I personally don't feel the need to have a specific calendar time, etc.. we have been just fine without and we started homeschool my girls when in Kindergarten.

[GPMommy]

I have the big board for calendar time in the morning and love it! It may be because I loved it so much when I worked in the classroom, but my kids find it very fun too and not realize they are going over their math skills again and it helps them just absurd those skills even more while having fun, so why not? We go over the calendar, add the date, say the months of the year, days of the week, count days in school, write the date on the placement card ones, tens, etc., do the weather, weather graph, season, go over phone number address, emergency number, sing a song, read a chapter from a fun book, sing abc's, go over colors, shapes, etc.

[alisoncooks]

This is our first year doing a calendar notebook.  (There is no room in my house for a calendar area.)

Before we start our lessons, we open up the notebook and breeze through our few pages.

I've streamlined it down to:  

• a number page from Numbers Galore (search on Teachers Pay Teachers -- it's free).  We'll do 1-20... don't know if we'll go to 50 or 100...  that's a lot of printing!
• a 100s chart (to count up to the 100th day of school)
• days of the week/months of the year review (including a laminated page where we practice writing the day of the week & it's abbreviation with dry erase marker -- clean at the end of each week)
• laminated chart to practice counting by 10s, 5s, 2s
• will be adding in memorization during this time (address, phone numbers first, then Bible, poetry, facts)

I was going to include a weather chart and tally mark page, but I decided they weren't worth the time for me.  They do bar graphs in math, as well as tallies.  And I don't care much re: how many sunny/rainy/cloudy days in August, etc.  

 

All-in-all, takes us 5 minutes and it's a nice way to eases into our formal school day.

[craftyerin]

I set up a big calendar bulletin board last year, since I felt like I was "supposed to".  We did it for about 2 months and I decided it was a waste of our time and put it away.  I'm with you. I don't see the point. 

[Soror]

Different strokes and all that but it is not for me. I gave up on trying to do this and feeling guilty about it. Our days flow better when we just jump right into our schooling. Circle time just felt disjointed to me.

[beaners]

"Circle time" in my house doesn't include a calendar.  I let everyone pick a picture book for me to read aloud, I stack up all the math and science and history read alouds I want to do, and I pick out a song or rhyme for everyone to move around to.  We talk about what we're doing for the day, including any appointments, planned lessons, chores and meals. I read and read and read and read until my head falls off, then everyone asks me to read some more.  And I do.  I ask everyone a few warm-up math questions.  We talk about stories we like.  We finish up and I lay the baby down for his nap and do speech work with my next youngest while my girls write or color narrations, then we move on to them playing or doing the things they've requested.

 

I don't think our circle times look very school-ish from the outside, but not many things look school-ish with some children laying on you and some laying upside down on the couch while you're nursing a baby.  We do borrow the "plan-do-review" HighScope technique, which gives the children some say in what their day will look like.  Talking about what everyone is excited to do early in the day and then what they've accomplished afterward is one of my favorite things to do with my children.   :) They are such interesting little people!

 

My children would love it if I was together enough to do a daily calendar with popsicle sticks and phases of the moon.  They would be thrilled.  I'm too scatter-brained for that sort of things to last more than 4 days in our house.

[plath]

We do it because it's an easy introduction to numbers and my dd loves it.  We've had the calendar on our wall for a few years now and we put up our weekly activities so she gets a visual.  It also helps because my dh travels for work frequently and we have a special card to put up when he leaves and returns. 

[Thia7278]

Our morning circle time helps us come together as a group and get into school mode. It tells them it's not time to play anymore. It's just a good way to start our day. And it is nice that I can skip parts of our math curric b/c we've already learned the material. We do the following: listen to a chapter of the Bible, memory work, calendar, writing the date, tally page, place value, weather. Boom, done, moving on. lol

[umsami]

Not a real calendar thing...but a few years ago DS1 and DS2 kept getting tomorrow and yesterday confused.  So I had three library pockets labeled with yesterday, today, and tomorrow on them.  I then had a bunch of index cards with the days of the week on them.  We'd put the days in each day so they could get the concept.  Did it a few weeks....they got it.... stopped doing it. :)

 

Being Waldorf-y, I actually love doing a morning verse with my kids.  When they were younger, we'd light a candle and sit in a circle and all that.  Kind of got away from that....but might start again cause everybody loved blowing out the candle. :)

[Murphy101]

I'm not sure this is what you mean, but I guess I do that. Sorta.

 

Every morning I have a meeting and that's when I give a lesson or play a review game and drill memory work and practice our languages.

 

It's not at all elaborate or "public school" like to me or my experiences with public schools.

 

It's just when we gather for the few group lesson items I need to cover with them.

[Saddlemomma]

We don't do anything with a calendar, but we do recite the 3 pledges (flag, Christian flag, and Bible).  We also sing a worship song then pray.  After that, we jump in!

 

[ladydusk]

We have a big plastic calendar. I took care of it for 5 years or so at breakfast. My kids do it now, so I haven't taken it down.

 

We had a breakfast board for a while but it didnt work for us.

 

We call it Circle Time, but it's singing, memory work/recitation, and read alouds.

[Murphy101]

I'm hit and miss on the calendar thing. It's no big deal either way though. We note major feast days.

 

If I have a kindy grade, I do calendar time with them. They draw a huge calendar every month and we add something to it as we go. It helps with counting, days of the week, moon cycles, holidays... But I'm lazy about it. It's not at all elaborate.

[AimeeM]

Actually, one of the wonderful things about homeschooling is that we can do whatever works for our families! Some of us are indeed more "school at home"... and it works for us :)

 

I plan on doing a morning time this year with my 4 year old. Seems like a great setting to dock some recitation and necessary "other" skills.

[AnnaM]

I haven't been doing it, but I decided I am going to add in a 15 minute quick review at the beginning of each day. We will just take a few minutes to go over what ever we are learning in each subject and maybe practice a word of the day or something like that.

[kristin0713]

We go over the calendar once a month. When they were younger we did it once a week. My kids are 7 and 5 now, the 7 year old fills out her own calendar and can keep track of everything but the 5yo is still learning. So we have a Melissa and Doug calendar and at the beginning of the month we work together on going over all the months and days and we practice them in French and ASL, and the kids take turns filling in the calendar. We also read the poem of the month from this book: http://www.amazon.com/A-Childs-Calendar-John-Updike/dp/0823414450/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376105077&sr=8-1&keywords=Updike+calendar

which I highly recommend for the beautiful illustrations and great poems, as well as the page of the month from The Year at Maple Hill Farm.

[silver]

I know some people do the elaborate calendar time in place of pre-K and K math. You can easily cover counting, number recognition and writing, patterns, one more, one less, days of the week, months of the year, and even coin values during calendar time. So they aren't actually doubling up on these things, because they aren't doing a formal math curriculum until 1st grade.

 

We do "group time" in my house. It's the first thing we do after breakfast. I read one chapter from one of the gospels, we all pray (on a theme of the day: praise God, pray for others, etc), we sing a worship song together (they can dance, sing, or play instruments), and then I read (chapter book on MWF, poetry on Tuesday, and a picture book of each child's choosing on Thursday). 

 

If we weren't Christian, I'd probably just have a group read-aloud time and leave it at that. And it'd probably just be randomly in the day (not first thing). For our family, group time incorporates what I would want them to be doing even if we were sending them to public school. I would still want them to be praying/worshiping. I would still be reading the Bible to them. I would still be reading good books to them.