A Healer’s Geste

Circle Time Binder

Well, we have completed our first term of first grade. And what a term it was! First grade begun, house on the market, house to buy, and first trimester exhaustion. Whoo. I’m ready for second term: First grade tweaked and ironed out, new house, second trimester, and coffee once again.

But, going into detail about our first term isn’t the point of this post. I wanted to detail one thing that worked very well: our Circle Time binder. Of course, the reason it worked so well is that I used a binder like this all last year and tweaked it every couple months. But now I think I’ve got it down and I’m very pleased with it.

We open with Circle Time, which includes prayer, singing, Scripture memory, and catechism memory. It takes us about 15 minutes total. So, once we’re all seated, and we pray, I pull out the binder:

I apologize for the poor quality of the photos; my camera is giving up on me. Here you can see the tab dividers, even though you can’t read them. They are hymns, creeds, current memory, chants, catechism, review memory.

We open to the first tab, which has the current hymn we’re learning first, and the previous hymns we’ve learned behind it.

The yellow flag sticks to the review hymn that we’ll do next, so it moves every time we do a review hymn. Right now that’s once or twice a week. Most days we sing the hymn for the term.

Then, we move to the next tab, which will generally hold the Apostle’s Creed and Heidelberg Q&A 1 which we will alternate, but right now also contains a selection of other Heidelberg selections we are trying to memorize. Starting off with a joint recitation of something the boys know very well, though, has been greatly beneficial, so I think for next term I’ll be moving the Heidelberg Q&As to the catechism section and we’ll take a break from the Children’s Catechism. Plus, there’s no more rousing way to kick things off than asking boldly, “Christian, what do you believe?” Way better than the Pledge of Allegiance.

Then I turn the tab over to “current memory” which contains the Scripture we’re memorizing for the term. My goal is one Psalm and one passage per term. So we do both sheets behind that tab. For the first week, I say them twice or thrice, then the next weeks they repeat after me until they begin doing it themselves with prompts. Next term, however, I’m going to give them their own copies so Hans can read aloud with me from the beginning. And, I can’t give Hans a copy to read without giving one to Jaeger, too, of course.

Then we turn to chants, and I flip to the page with a yellow flag, and we quickly zip through whatever fact list is up for the day. I have the books of the Old Testament, the New Testament, the 12 Apostles, the days of the week and months of the year, “30 Days Hath September”, and some skip counting. Doing one of these takes about 30 seconds, but we do each one once a week, and they will stay constant all year.

Then the catechism tab is up, and I again flip to the page with the yellow tag. I have the Catechism for Young Children printed out with about 10 questions per page. I ask the questions on one page and the boys either jointly or individually or alternately give me the answers. Their success is linked intimately with how often they listen to the Catechism on their quiet time CDs, which has not been consistent at all for months and months. Sigh.

Then lastly we turn to the review memory tab, and the yellow flag, and recite together one of the Psalms or passages we have learned previously. I noticed this term a dreadful lack of retention, so I’m committed to regaining consistency with the quiet time CDs again after things settle.

Then, we’re done with the binder, and I trade it in for the Bible lesson material and we try to keep up our brisk pace! :)