Circle Time is one of those things that has worked consistently well for me… until this year, that is. A number of factors converged, and I tried doing it less often, only to do it even less than that, and so I’d say we did about a term-and-a-half worth of Circle Time last year. I considered beating myself up over it but the fact remains that the best idea is just to dust myself off and keep plodding on this one.
This year, I’ve planned a very simple Circle Time. Part of the problem last year is that I just planned too much. As my children get more independent at their lessons, I’ll incorporate more into Circle Time again, but right now each child needs so much that I can’t spend 90 minutes on it, even if that does sound fun to me sometimes.
If you look closely you’ll see that a lot of the memory work is the same thing that appeared on my last plans and that is because, as I said, we didn’t really do what I wanted us to do. I assume that halfway through we’ll update the poems, but we’ll just see how it goes. I’m not in a hurry.
For folk songs, I’m mainly doing the AO rotation, but I’m starting us off with the last song of last year because I really wanted to teach the children Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen. I may be able to cram in a fourth song; we shall see.
For hymns, we already knew the November hymn, which is good. We can usually only learn two hymns in a term, and this way I don’t have to choose.
The geography is new, and I’m excited about it. I using the books as a reference for me and then I’ll be trying to teach it orally. We may need to go outside for some of it, which means it’ll be the last thing we do for Circle Time on those days.
So here’s my schedule:
Resources
- Hymns:
- Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken
- There is a Happy Land {I actually copied and pasted the scan of the old hymnal so that I could use my piano as we learn.}
- Folk Songs:
- Geography:
- We’ll work on Ambleside Online’s new geography rotation starting in Year One. I haven’t decided if I’ll try to “catch up” my two older children.
- Home Geography for Primary Grades by C.C. Long free on Kindle
- Elementary Geography by Charlotte Mason free PDF file
- Use Push to Kindle
- Artist Study–John Singleton Copley:
- Lynn Bruce’s notes on the selections by John Singleton Copley
- All of my selections in landscape formatted for easy printing
- My one selection in portrait formatting
- John Calvin:
- Composer Study–Franz Joseph Haydn:
- String Quartet Op 76 no 3 “Emperor”
- London Symphony no 104
- The Creation
- Horn Concerto No. 1 in D major
- Astronomy:
- Burgess:
- We’re finishing up the Bird Book for Children
- then moving on to the Animal Book for Children
- Pilgrim’s Progress:
- Continuing our normal rotation
- School Prep: Watercolor Notebooks
- School Prep: Morning Routine and Chores
- School Prep: Book Substitution
- School Prep: Poetry
- School Prep: Course of Study Forms
- Legally Required Records for Independent Private Schools in the State of California
- School Prep: AO Selections for the Less Bookish Child
- School Prep: Picking Ourselves Up After a Circle Time Fail ← you are here

9 Comments
What’s the age spread with your kids? Do you always use the same recitation pieces for the group? Any time you have different aged kids do more/ different poems, for example?
This is from three years ago, so I think they were 6th, 3rd, 1st, and preschool at that time. Here is my latest plan. It’s for 9th, 6th, 4th, and 2nd. They each choose a poem out of the poetry they read during the previous term’s work, but then we all try to memorize all of them.
Brandy,
A quick question on your composer study– Did you purchase all of these selections? And when you spend more than one week on a piece, are you just coming back for several weeks and listening to it each time, or is there something more involved? I am really trying to be as simple as possible, so I am hoping there is not a lot more to this!!
Julie in St. Louis
Yes, I really did purchase all of these selections. 🙂 I was going to try another approach, but I just kept coming back to the fact that downloading this to my iPod or burning it to a CD was the likeliest way I would actually do this. My goal this year is for composer study to actually happen. 🙂
I am not very good at composer study, so I can’t really tell you what you *should* do, but in looking at The Creation, for example, it is very, very long. So in breaking it up over 4 weeks, I don’t think we’ll be repeating anything, if that makes sense. You may want to look at the Wikipedia article for more insight in how to do it. Basically, it says that The Creation has three parts. Part I is the six days of creation proper. I plan to therefore listen to the first three days in week 1, the second three days in week 2, and then use the last two weeks for part 3 and part 4. I’m going to read the appropriate Bible passages before we listen. 🙂
Brandy – Wow, this is crazy! You comment on my blog, then I accidentally find yours! Awesome stuff; can’t wait to read!!
You are all very welcome. I’m happy to do it. 🙂
Yes, thank you, thank you! As always, I kind of wait to start my planning a couple of weeks after you, as you help get my mind in that mode, and you so generously provide the links as well!
Julie in St. Louis
Oh my goodness, Brandy! Thank you for sharing. I wish I knew how to do all that computery stuff. The prints were making me crazy.
Hello Brandy,
I’ve been a lurker for a bit on your blog and enjoy reading it very much. I just spent the last few days trying to figure out the best place to download the art prints from, size them to be printed and what size frames to get so that I can use the same frames over with each new artist we study. This may seem easy, I’m sure I just made it harder. But then I read your post today and had to tell you, thank you. There your prints were, shared with the rest of us, ready to go, easy peasy. Thank you that you take the time to post them for others to use. I am sure you are busy, I know I am (4 kiddos, 7 and under) but you still shared with others your hard work. I probably will not be much of a commenter. But I am a faithful reader. I just wanted to make sure thank you was said. You just saved me so much time. Time that I can use teaching my kids instead of planning. Bless you!