Daily Archives: June 5, 2018


The Importance of Circle Time

Let’s talk about the circle time. At our circle time the children are working on and learning many skills, all of which are helping them with their readiness for their academic life beginning with kindergarten. The biggest skill the children are practicing is self-control and self-regulation. These get practiced when the child sits in his/her spot and listens to the teacher and to the instructions. The child, to the best of his/her ability is learning to quiet him/herself and control his/her body. Every child develops the ability to do this at his/her own rate. Practicing this every week helps the child develop these skills.

Another part of circle time that helps your child with his/her development is the singing, rhyming books, and finger plays or movement activity. These are important because the singing, rhyming, and finger plays help the children with the development of their phonemic awareness skills. These are simply the understanding that words are made up of separate sounds. Singing helps draw out the separate sounds and rhyming helps the child in the future with learning word families. Finger plays and movement help the children develop and refine their fine and gross motor skills. Additionally, as children are read to, they increase their print awareness knowledge, that is, they learn the parts of the book, how to turn pages, that the words and pictures work together to tell the story, and left to right orientation.

Circle time is also a wonderful opportunity to introduce and practice certain academic concepts. Usually, these concepts touch on curriculum areas such as early literacy, mathematics, science, and social studies. Some concepts that I teach during circle time are letter and number recognition, one-to-one counting, shapes, patterns, size, sorting and categorization, order, comprehension, comparisons, and print awareness.

To learn more about the importance of circle time, click here