The Importance of Circle Time
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.
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