Community Circle in the morning

by Tracy
(Ontario, CA)

Our community morning time begins outside when my students arrive at 8:20. The "heavy lifters" take our backpack baskets to our room. Once we're inside the fun begins.

They all know to take down chairs, get their place ready for learning (pencil boxes,name tags, other items needed). Table leaders pass out the work clipped to the table stands. Everyone checks in with their name magnet on the whiteboard (graphing who is eating hot/cold lunch).

The Math Wiz of the week takes the tally and notes who is absent. Others are making sure the pets are fed and greeted, guests are seated in our special chair as well as anyone who is "celebrated" get their special chair too.

The "Weather Person" takes the temp outside and in for more graphing. "Paper Patrol" makes sure the pm classes art projects are collected and placed in their tub.

They sit at their tables and begin their "Brain Work".8:35 bell rings. We wake up our brains by doing a Brain Gym activity and sit down to do our daily math calendar journals and songs.

This takes about 20 minutes to train them and then gets down to as fast as 8-10mins. We move to the carpet to do our greeting songs by Dr.Jean and then start our Language arts program and it's not even 9:00 yet!