Favorite Resources for Homeschool Circle Time
Today I want to share with you my favorite resources for homeschool circle time!
Preschool Circle
A Child’s Seasonal Treasury by Betty Jones. With songs, movement games, fingerplays, and even crafts and recipes, this has long been my number one pick for the preschool years!
Sing a Song of Seasons and Lavender’s Blue Dilly Dilly by Mary Thienes Schunemann. These are wonderful songbooks with seasonal songs (the first one), nursery rhymes and traditional circle games (the second one), lullabies, and every song on the included CDs. I can’t say enough good things about these!
The Singing Year by Candy Verney. More songs and poems for the seasons. Many of the songs are original and they’re all recorded on CD.
The Circle Time page on the Lavender’s Blue blog. Complete circle times for preschool on up.
Kindergarten Circle
All of the above plus these resources for complete circle times:
Lavender’s Blue Homeschool Kindergarten curriculum by Kelly Ehrman. The kindy curriculum includes a complete circle with lots of songs, verses, and movement. It’s an integrated circle that follows the seasons from fall through spring, with audio for all songs and verses included.
Movement Journeys and Circle Adventures by Nancy Blanning and Laurie Clark. This resource is amazing, with compelling story-circles for each season including detailed suggestions for developmental movement. The focus for most of the circles is less on song and more on verse, activity, and gesture and they do involve quite a bit of memorization for the teacher. The subtitle is “Movement enrichment with a therapeutic approach for early childhood,” but I think it would work in the early grades as well.
Let Us Form a Ring and Dancing As We Sing by Nancy Foster and Carol Petrash. These books are well-loved in many kindergartens and homeschools and they are full of simple circle plays and pentatonic songs. There’s also a section of sweet songs to go along with some of the most well-known fairy tales.
Early Grades Circle
Path of Discovery Grade One and Grade Two by Eric Fairman. Both of these have a section full of action verses and poems suitable for the grades.
Music Through the Grades in the Light of the Developing Child by Diane Ingraham Barnes. This music anthology follows the Waldorf music curriculum with songs for singing and recorder for grades one through eight. The songs for the first three grades are recorded on CD.
Marsha Johnson’s Magic of Waldorf page. Marsha creates such fun and engaging circle times full of verses, movement, and games that fit in wonderfully with her main lesson blocks.
The Lavender’s Blue Homeschool First Grade curriculum by Kelly Ehrman. The first grade curriculum includes a complete circle time for each main lesson block, with seasonal songs, movement, speech work, and active math. All the songs and verses are recorded on mp3.