Ep. 64: Preschool Circle Time Tips for Engagement, Structure, and Special Education Success

Preschool circle time doesn’t have to be chaos! 🎶 In this episode, we share simple strategies to keep little learners engaged, structured, and having fun—while meeting every student where they are. 🌟

🎧 Key Takeaways
• Purpose of Circle Time: Sets the tone for the day, offering structure and fun through songs, weather checks, and IEP skill practice. Adaptations are key to meeting the students where they are! 🌞
• Four Pillars of a Balanced Circle Time:
     1. Physical Movement: Gross or fine motor activities to keep kids engaged 🏃‍♂️
     2. Sensory Engagement: Incorporate sight, sound, and touch 🌈
     3. Social Interaction: Encourage greetings, peer interactions, and communication 🤝
     4. Cognitive Development: Incorporate pre-academic tasks like counting and identifying letters 🔤
• Circle Time Duration: Tailor it to your learners’ needs, generally 10-15 minutes for preschool, with shorter increments for younger or less-attentive children ⏱️
• Handling Refusals: Modify circle time to include small groupings, alternate activities, and sensory breaks for students who need it 🙋‍♂️
• Make It Fun: Use creative methods like sticker rewards, visual aids, and fun songs to maintain engagement and make learning enjoyable 🎶✨

🧰 Resources & Links
• Ideas for circle time songs: Simple, fun tunes like "Jack Hartmann" songs to keep kids engaged and interactive 🎵
• Visual aids: Use yes/no boards, weather charts, and name cards to boost participation and social skills 📊 Check out these circle time resources!
• Alternative activities: Quiet corner activities like puzzles for students who need a break 🧩 Try these calm corner visuals:
• Related Episodes: Misfit Minute #9 A fun circle time activity and Episode #18 Behavior Management Basics 

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Transcript

Ep. 64: Preschool Circle Time Tips for Engagement, Structure, and Special Education Success 

[00:00:00] Audra: I love to get creative, I'd have stickers in my hand and when I'd see somebody doing something, I'd put one on my face and they just thought it was hilarious. So, you know, they just, you know, totally engaged. So funny. So by the end of circle time I'm just covered head toe with stickers, 

[00:00:13] Intro: welcome to the Misfit Behaviorist Podcast. Join your hosts, Audra Jensen and Caitlin Beltran here to bring you evidence-based strategies with a student-centered focus. Let's get started.

[00:00:26] Audra: Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Misfit Behaviors Podcast. And today we wanted to talk about early childhood circle time and the benefits of it, and a couple of ideas of how to run it and a schedule. And so we are going to dive into talking about littles and running circle times and why that's important. So Caitlin, how many little cute circle times have you seen over the years?

[00:00:49] Caitlin: So many on the rug, on the table. In a circle. In a line. Children running away from the circle.

[00:00:55] Audra: That's the big one. Yes. So what have you seen is the easy quick tips that you think of when you go into a circle time that you're like, they are doing it well right there. What do you see?

[00:01:06] Caitlin: I think a huge one is just being prepared, having everything ready to go, whether it's like your story, your whiteboard, interactive activity, your question and answer, like whatever you have, whatever you want to use. Having it within arm's reach, and then really, I think I just see a difference in classrooms that are doing it consistently every day. They find their rhythm, as opposed to if you're trying it once in a while or every other day. I really do think it's so overwhelming at first to get all of these littles sitting and then participating. But the more you do it, the better you become at like modeling that calm, and of course the more practice only helps your littles.

[00:01:42] Audra: Yeah, that's perfect. It kind of leads me right into the first thing, what is the purpose of doing circle time? And for me, it sets the tone of the day, it sets up the day structure. It's fun. There's a connection. You have all these littles coming in at different times and stuff. Some come in from the bus, some come in from the cars and all this stuff . So I usually did a short little circle time in the beginning and a short little circle time at the end. Both kind of for the serving the same reason is like getting them together in a setting of learning and preparing and setting the structure and the expectations for the day. And then the end is sort of wrapping us back up at the end of the day preparing to then leave. I think what you said is so important, making it consistent and making it the same every day. Not the exact same, but the same structure makes it easier for them to understand and to use it in such a way that it's helpful for them. And it can include anything from doing circle time songs to calendar to weather, social games, IEP skill practice, academics, those type of things. You're gonna kind of tailor your circle time to all the students you have, but also from day to day. So I've had times where I have kids come in and they are not ready to engage in our typical circle time. So we throw the plan out the window and today we're just doing bubbles or something. We're kind of setting up the same circle time, but we're gonna modify it to whatever the students' skillset at is at in the moment. And so I find that those are really helpful kind of thinking about. Who are my students right now? And what kind of state of mind are they in today?

[00:03:11] I think about four pillars of a balance circle time. The first one being something physical. It can be a gross motor, a fine motor, moving the body in some way 'cause expecting three, four year olds, especially those with disabilities to sit still for any amount of time is almost impossible. So incorporating some sort of physical movement helps with that. The second thing is using sensory, so making sure there's something that they can hear, something that they can see, something that they can touch. We have a lot of kids with sensory integration disorders or sensory sensitivities where we're embedding some of those sensory movements and kind of their senses to get in with what we're doing will help them acclimate to the learning situation that we're doing right there.

[00:03:57] Caitlin: I love that. And it's all about keeping them engaged too, so they're not just sitting there passively, they're sitting there doing something like touching or smelling or popping the bubble. They're active participants.

[00:04:07] Audra: Yes, exactly. And that kind of leads into the third one, I think is social, is making sure that they're crossing boundaries with their peers. They're doing something social, they're doing greetings, they're doing some sort of interaction that it's not just sitting there listening to us tell them what the plan is of the day or telling us what the weather is, it's like they're participating with it. And social doesn't mean that we're engaged in a game. Social is just interacting in any sort of learning. Any social interaction we have with either teachers or their peers next to 'em or any sort of way, talking is a social activity. And then the fourth thing that I see as a pillar of the circle time is something cognitive. Whether it's, we are in school, whether it's counting or naming or letters recalling information, these are where kind of your IEP goals come into play.

[00:04:54] So I think about those four things. You know, making sure I'm doing something physical, something specifically sensory related, something social and something cognitive or academic, pre-academic in each of those circle time groups .

[00:05:07] And then the next thing is like, how long should a circle time be?

[00:05:11] Caitlin: It totally depends on your learners and where they're at and also your grouping, so maybe you have six students and four, five of them can sit for like 10 to 15 minutes. You might have one that still only can sit for about five minutes, maybe that learner's coming in and out of the circle. But in the beginning, I would say always start below what you think their threshold is so that you're meeting with success. You're not trying to set a new goal of sitting every day. You're just trying to sit 10 minute group I think is fine. For that age I don't think we have a lot of groups longer than that. How about you?

[00:05:41] Audra: And I think starting as small as possible and then growing it, you don't wanna have a bunch of errors and set the kids up for failure right away by having too long of a circle time or too high of expectations. Start really simple so they can be successful. I've seen the rule of thumb is like three minutes per year is kind of a good average. So your three year olds, you can have like about a nine minute circle time and you get to your four year olds, you're looking at maybe a 12 minute circle time, but that's what you're talking about. Around 10 minutes, 10 to 15 minutes tops is what I've ever seen successful in a preschool. Getting into kindergarten, first grade, you wanna expect a little bit more, but especially in our special education preschool settings, 5, 10, 12 minutes is the most that I would ever do. Shorter is just sometimes better for their attention and participation. Yeah. You want it to be a fun, exciting, participatory thing for them to be doing.

[00:06:32] Caitlin: Right. You want us to be meaningful, so maybe you're doing like three, five minute groups across your daily schedule. The last thing you want is that, I feel like we all have seen this, where you have one letter, like every day comes in and it's like, all right, unpack table, toy, whatever, time for circle, NO!. And you don't want that to be aversive, so if you're trying every day to do this perfect 15 minutes, start to finish group, and this child is just not having it, maybe they don't even know how to sit for two minutes even though they're four. So we really have to individualize everything for your individual learner, and that's when you need to start practicing those prerequisite skills. Also, outside of group time.

[00:07:07] Audra: That's actually a great lead into the next thing is like what do you do if you have students who refuse or you have a classroom, which always happens, where you have some students who can do more and some students who less. One of the things I've seen and kind of advocated for is it's okay to do multiple circle times at different levels. Mm-hmm. So you have a para that's working with some students in a corner doing something fun, and then you're running a circle time with certain goals and stuff. Then maybe you switch and the para now takes the group that you've had in circle time and you're running a different kind of circle time and they're shorter of circle times 'cause you wanna fit 'em in the time that you have, but you can modify then what you're doing in circle time for the kids that you have within that group. You don't have to have the entire class there at all times. Say you have a class of 15 students, half of them can do great circle time and half really need very specific, short goals and so split it up and do two. There's nothing wrong with that.

[00:07:57] Caitlin: I love that. I haven't done two separate groups as much, but a lot of times our groups tend to be pretty small, our classroom sizes to begin with. But a lot of times, I would say the teacher's running a group and maybe 80% of the kids can sit for the whole group within reason. But there's one or two kids that a para is taking more in increments and so they're learning to just sit for one to two minutes at a time and then going on like an individual break or something like that and then coming back. So building it up that way.

[00:08:22] Audra: And so for that student who is refusing circle time, some questions pop into my head, for one thing, are the activities that I'm running developmentally appropriate for this group, making sure that whatever I'm doing is appropriate for this particular group 'cause maybe I'm shooting too high and I need to bring down what the activities are. So that's one thing. Is the student regulated? Is the student ready to learn? Is there something that we need to do to help that student present themselves in such a way that they're in a ready state to learn? And maybe they're not ready for circle time today, or this week or this month, and we need to think about doing something else. Think about can they communicate their needs? If they're in circle time and they're overwhelmed and they feel like it's time to go, can they communicate? Can I be all done or I need a break, or, no, thank you. And those are what you're talking about, really good to teach is prerequisite skills, something you're gonna do outside of circle time, but giving them the opportunity to ascent and descent. Like say, I don't wanna do this right now, and then to honor that request and let them out of circle time, 'cause you're gonna avoid those behaviors beforehand if you teach them those skills to use in the moment.

[00:09:28] Caitlin: I love looking at it like really individually, like which variable is it? Because a lot of times I think we're quick to say, oh, they just can't sit for group. But I'm thinking of two learners in our early education program where one, he cannot sit very well for group, maybe a minute or two max. He's a very young little guy, but he doesn't really sit for much longer than that throughout his whole day. So he's just a mover and a shaker, he's very restless. So to me that's not a group issue. It's sitting and attending and like you're saying, the regulation. Whereas another learner, he can sit for a very long time if he's doing something preferred or when he's eating. But during group, he sees his friends and he gets really silly and he wants to chase and tickle and do all these fun things. So for him, it is more specific to group. I would target those two things very differently.

[00:10:12] Audra: That is a great point in thinking about individually, what your goal is for that particular student, and like you said, we've done, many times, having an alternate activity available. And making sure that that activity is not a highly preferred activity. So you're not gonna go, you get out of circle time so you can go play with the iPad, but maybe there's a quiet activity, a puzzle or something off in a corner where they can hear what's going on. And a para is there monitoring, but it's not a highly preferred activity. It gives them a chance to acclimate to what their group expectations are. And always when they join in at whatever level they're at, making sure that we're reinforcing that and being so happy that they're there, if that's what they respond to, but just making sure that they feel inclusive regardless of where they are, whatever state of learning they're in, that we're being inclusive to them and bringing them in. Again, like you said, that gradual participation. Maybe today our goal is just to sit down in the chair and then up and you're out and maybe the next day is sit down and give a high five and then you're up and you're out. Whatever it is to slowly, gradually build up their tolerance to it and to see that it's a fun thing to be participating in.

[00:11:18] Caitlin: Yes, absolutely. So, in our classrooms, a lot of the little guys have like token boards or first end boards, and I think one thing I'm always reminding staff and paras of is, that doesn't have to be just for work session. So I think sometimes it's like, oh, we're doing IEP goals, I have their token board out, but oh, they're just gonna sit and listen to a story that not hard. Just like you're describing them, sitting is their goal. So we're not waiting for them to sit and then answer the teacher's questions or give us the weather, them just sitting for a minute. Boom, token, sit for another minute. Boom. Token, now you're showing them that their break is coming and also being consistent with reinforcing those appropriate behaviors.

[00:11:53] Audra: I love to get creative, like I used to have stickers. Do it like it's a group contingency or specifically for what they're doing. But I'd have stickers in my hand and when I'd see somebody doing something, I'd put one on my face and they just thought it was hilarious. So, you know, they just, you know, totally engaged. So funny. So by the end of circle time I'm just covered head toe with stickers, just get creative, have fun. I mean, the whole point is to keep them engaged. That's the goal of Circle time really, is to have fun in a learning social situation.

[00:12:21] Caitlin: Exactly.

[00:12:22] Audra: So a couple of common pitfalls to watch out for, making sure that it's not forced. The more you make it fun and finding out activities that they're interested in, that they can participate in, having those that are refusing to come, maybe they're the helpers. They pick the popsicle stick that has the person's name or whatever it is, you're gonna have so much more success if you have a student that wants to engage and engages for that reason than if you force them. Say you have one particular student doesn't like circle time, but they love cars, so the next time you do circle time, do a car song, do something that engages with that student that they'll want to come into the group learning.

[00:12:57] And then, we're not replacing hands-on play. We're not replacing free play. Circle time is really just that introduction to a structured learning situation. You're also getting them into a group learning situation, which is gonna be new, especially for your brand new three year olds who really haven't been into a group learning. You know, they do do free play all day, but we don't wanna replace that free play 'cause there's so much that can be learned in just regular free play. So don't think of circle time as free play. Make sure you're embedding play throughout your day as well.

[00:13:27] So then I thought I'd tell you the schedule that I used and maybe hear from you, what you've seen is a general schedule, I think it's helpful for, especially if you're a new teacher, thinking about how do I structure a circle time for these littles? So I would say like my opening circle time, so they'd all come in at different times, right? And my favorite thing is to have the cube chairs. Do you guys have the cube chairs? Mm-hmm. It's not just sitting on a regular chair, it's not on the floor, but it has structure to it. They like little and

[00:13:50] Caitlin: it's the throne.

[00:13:51] Audra: Oh my gosh. Gosh. They're fantastic. Have you seen that they also have the trays that you can get? No. I use this with DT as well, for the real littles who can sit in the cube chair and then they have this tray that kind of doesn't really snap to it, but it sits right on it and it, and so I do all of my materials right there in front of 'em. So fantastic. Not for circle time, but it's just an extra bonus thing. I love those. So I like if I can do those cube chairs or some sort of structure or a lot of times we have spaces on the ground so that they have their space because we have a lot of, you know, hands and feet going everywhere, which is something to think about. So we'd always bring everybody here. We using a welcome time song, the Simple silly songs. There's a whole bunch of those Hello songs.

[00:14:33] Caitlin: Yeah, it's, so, I'd use Jack Hartman a lot.

[00:14:36] Audra: Oh yes. Love Jack Hartman. Gosh, he's gotta be so old now. In the beginning of the year, I'd get a picture of all of their faces and I'd blow it to like a good size and like a quarter page size. Mm-hmm. And then I'd cut out just the face. I put 'em on Popsicle sticks. So I'd have, and this is how we did, like, who's here today? And I'd randomly pull one out, oh, who's here today? And then we have a cute little jingle thing, and we'd say, oh, there's, there's Johnny Johnny's here today. And, hello Johnny, how are you? Stand up tall, and we'll clap for you. Hey, you gotta sing too. He would stand up and everybody would clap, say hi to Johnny, and then you're building in greetings, you're building in that social interaction. Then they'd go put their face on the who's here today. So something like that. Getting everybody, doing the greetings together, saying hi to each other, identifying their, either you're doing, I've done names for kind of my older groups, like identifying whose name is this. You're working on learning names or faces are a really good one. So a quick welcome song. Who's here, who's at home? Who are we missing today? And then we'd go into either a weather or calendar, I would keep this really, really short, especially in preschool. They're not ready to go through a whole month's worth of numbers or counting by fives or anything like that. But we would put what the day of the week is, what the date is. Our favorite thing to do is weather. So we'd have a weather song, we'd use Weather Bear. How are we gonna dress the bear? We'd have somebody go out and look outside, what does the weather look like today? What's weather Bear gonna wear? You do this in two minutes really, really fast. Mm-hmm. And then we'd do a question of the day. So I'd have different pictures, full size picture of chocolate cake and carrot or a couple of different things, put 'em up on the board. And today the picture, who likes chocolate? And then again, we'd have little pictures of their faces or their names who'd go, you know, so-and-so likes chocolate cake. And they'd go under there. And then so-and-so likes carrots. They'd go under there. And then you're looking at who likes the same thing as me? Who doesn't like this? Mm-hmm. And so we have a quick, quick visual. Who likes and who doesn't like and who played soccer last week, or whatever. It's right. It's a very, very quick question of the day. And again, that takes like two minutes. We do that very quickly. And then my favorite time is singing time and having all the visuals. There's so much you can do with a singing time with just your basic nursery rhyme songs and stuff like that. But using visuals, props, choice boards, who's picking? And we would do something like, we'd have different shapes up on the board, and then whoever's turn it is to pick, they would come and pick which song they wanted, their little visual choices, and depending on who it is, either they get one of two choices or they can choose from all of the songs, so they choose it. Okay. You put it on the red circle and then you're incorporating some of the academic stuff too, and then they put their little Velcro picture of the song they chose on the red circle. And then we sing the song with the props. And then we have some social engagement because all the props that I use, I like if we're doing Twinkle Twinkle or something, I have a whole bunch of little stars on Popsicle sticks. The chooser of the song gets to hand out each of the stars to each of the friends. And so then you're getting some movement of the child moving up and holding and then passing out. You get the social engagement with each student. You just have so many skills that you work on and then you're singing, you're working on, choral, responding, you're saying something together. I like to sing songs and then pause and so twinkle, twinkle little and then see if they as a group will then join in. So just getting creative. How can I do this very simple thing that everybody knows, but I can tweak it a little bit to either bring in some language, some academic, anything that you can do to hit some of those IEP goals we might be working on.

[00:18:16] Caitlin: I love that. Yeah. I think ours are very similar weather, clothing, seasons, things like that. Question of the day I love. Sometimes after a weekend, the parents would email weekend news. So if they went anywhere or did anything. That's just like an added bonus. If you can pop that picture up into your slideshow, it's like, oh, so and so went to the farm and saw horses. Like, who likes horses? Like then they're saying yes or no, or, and then they can maybe like seeing that picture of themself too builds that engagement.

[00:18:43] Audra: Oh, I love that. I love that you brought up the visual. So using yes and no. But we have yes and nos all the time. Even little popsicle yes nos that everybody has. And so when you ask those questions to be able to hold up the yes or the no mm-hmm. You're working on engagement, social, following directions as well as the language piece of yes and no questions. Yes and no is really an underdeveloped and underappreciated skill being able to say yes no very much 'cause if you have a brand new language learner, if you could teach them to understand the concept of what yes no means, and then get them to be able to use that appropriately, there's so much language that opens up to them by being able to answer yes and no questions. Right. And so guess I'm a super big fan of teaching yes and no.

[00:19:25] Then the last thing in our circle, and we always end with a quick goodbye song or transition song. And this in the morning circle time, or the beginning circle time was always good to then talk about what's the next thing we're going to do. So pulling up the schedule, either the group schedule, individual schedules so that they know what's expected of them next, where they're going next, and it doesn't end with mad chaos. And then our closing circle time is very similar, it's much shorter, but at the end of the day, a lot of them are more dysregulated. They're in a state of overwhelmed. It's been a whole day of preschool. Everybody wants to go home and stuff. I find closing circle time really centers them for a minute before sending them out to the buses and the parents. Mm-hmm. And just real quick, so a quick transition song, a very quick recap of the day. What did we work on today? What did we play with? We went to recess, we saw it was raining today. And I do something really quick. If the kids are ready to do a sort of story time is a good time to do that, to bring down that energy if they're able to do that. I like to use a lot of those board books and quick interaction, like poke the button and push things and those are really fun.

[00:20:29] Then we'd always end with movement of some kind, either silly dances or bubbles. And that's a great time for your paras to help getting all of the backpacks ready 'cause when they're three years old and putting all those, they can't do that yet. So we're the ones that have to put all of the daily notes in and the know the crafts and all this stuff. We have to figure out which backpack goes where. And these ones go over here to the door that's going out to the buses. This one goes over here to the parents. So bubbles is a great way, and they love like those automatic bubbles. I clear out the rug in the middle and we just do bubbles. And the couple of paras that I'd have would be putting all those together and that's a great way, okay. It's time to go. And that's how we ended our days.

[00:21:10] So that's it for us this week and we will catch you next week. Make sure you find us on Facebook and we put our little freebies in there like and subscribe, and we will be back soon.

[00:21:21] Intro: Thanks for listening to the misfit behaviorists, and be sure to tune in next week for more tips and tricks. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.