How to Make an Interactive Circle Time with Google Slides!
Profª Suellen Balado
Pedagoga, Mestra em Didáticas
Doutoranda em Educação pela Universidade da Coruña
I've seen many teachers starting to use Google Classroom and Google Meet as resources to reach their students now that online learning is being so used! As a kindergarten teacher, it is a double challenge because young children need to feel, touch and interact in order to have a significant learning experience.
On the other hand, I think it is a positive tendency because it is forcing teachers to up their games, get out of their comfort zone, and learn a bunch of new stuff!
So all these new resources can be also used in the actual classroom and work just as well! bringing new life, decrease the waste of resources, and also step in the digital world in which our children were already born in, and are already fluent at a very young age.
So I came down to the idea I want to share! In order to make our circle time a little bit more familiar in online classes, but also as a chance to enhance learning, I have prepared an Interactive and completely editable document in Google Slides to use while having our videoconferences with our class.
This is a document we will present during our Gmeet but also edit it as we speak with our students, so they can really feel like active participants at the same time as they have a visual aid to build on it.
Here is a 2 minutes video that kind of shows how it goes!
The first slide is the Attendance
As if it was a normal circle time in class, we ask:
- Who is here and who is not here
- If you are here, are you a boy or a girl? So should I put you in the left or right column?
- When it is done, we'll have built a simple graph. So altogether, we count how many students in each column, we'll put the numbers and turn the crocodile to eat the higher number.
Simple as it is, on this page we are developing our oral skills, learning about counting, left and right, simple graphs, building the basis to learn how to use the signs of > and < (greater than, less than).
The next Slide is "How are you feeling today"
On this one, we'll ask children how are they feeling today. As they answer we'll place their names on the correspondent emoticon.
This activity is a good thermometer that will help the teacher to set a proper pace for the class on that day because we'll show the level os motivation of the students. Something we must consider, especially in online learning.
Also, provides students with the opportunity to use oral skills and talk a little bit about themselves, what is grate to build self-confidence and raise their self-esteem, as much as the sense of belonging and acknowledgment that he/she is in a safe environment with people he/she can trust.
The next Slide is the Calendar
The Calendar is a great way of introducing to children the dynamics of time passing, like years, months, weeks, and finally, days.
The same applies to weather and natural changes such as seasons.
Because of that, this calendar will bring out all of these concepts while working on other aspects of global development.
So, when a new month starts, it is a good idea to take a minute to stress it out, like saying "Today we are starting a new month! So we say bye-bye February! Hello March!". The same for seasons, and years.
To use our calendar, we must consider it as a continuous. So it is interesting to keep one document for each class you teach, that way, the information regarding the calendar, for example, will remain and be developed along the year.
The first step is to retrieve the information children already have: so we ask "Who remembers which is the month we are in?"
The same to the day of the week on the bottom.
Next is to set the day of the month, considering the last weather mark on the previous day, we can expect children to be able to answer
"Yesterday was March the 5th, what day is today?"
"Look outside the window. How is the weather today?" -sunny- so we drag a little sun to place on the 6th.
When the month is over, we can count how many days of each (sunny, cloudy etc.) there were.
This calendar also allows you to mark special dates, as the example in the image.
Using the calendar we can help children to develop the concept of time. We exercise the pattern making and prediction skills and their oral abilities.
We value their interests and help them plan ahead, once we mark important dates on it and develop their sense of responsibility.
The next slide is the Date
Following the Calendar, we'll build the Date frame. It is a good way to start developing the correct way of representing it, once we give a correct model as a basic rule.
On this slide, we'll write the date as it should be, with or without children's interference, then stress out the out of ordinary events that are going to happen on that day. It helps to build some control over what happens to them; their confidence.
The next slide is "How is the weather today"
Acknowledge the environment around them, help children to build a sense of cause and effect, the basis to responsibility. observe the surroundings and act according to it in order to be successful. In this case, we also build a sense of self-care.
Beyond that, we also teach some simple math concepts to relate temperatures (high and low) and clothing vocabulary.
To use this slide we'll ask children how is the temperature today. Is it very cold, cold, warm, hot, etc. let them use their vocabulary and always encourage them to explain their conclusions. at last, drag the arrow to the temperature in which all agree.
Building on that, we explore the appropriate clothing for the day. we take a moment to use all the vocabulary they know before come to a final conclusion. then drag the clothes to the corresponding space.
The next slide is "Shuffle a list"
This slide helps aquiring the ordinal numbers idea. it is a extra slide that is more usable in a real classroom than in online instruccion, because, in the second case, it is unlikely that children would do it.
Anyway, the idea is to shuffle some names and place on the spaces reinforcing the vocabulary: The first name is.... The second name is...
The leaders of each group can change every day, the same fo the teacher helper. These titles help children to build a sense of responsibility over oneself and others in his/her group.
The next slide is "Pick your team"
In the spirit of building responsibility over oneself and others, my suggestion is to let each team leader choose their groups. one at a time chooses 1 kid, until everyone has a group.
You can download this material for free!!
