Ideas for a Preschool Circle Time About Seasons

Preschool Learning Styles

There are many ways you can explore the different seasons at circle time so that you can cover a range of developmental areas, and

cater for the different ways that children learn, while still being fun and playful.

In the following sections, I will ideas for how to teach a preschool circle time about seasons to the social child, the active child, the thinking child and the creative child.

The Thinking Child

Make a visual display for children to look at to explore the different seasons. A common way to do this is to have pictures that represent the different seasons and/or different weather. Such as snow flakes, falling leaves, a sun, new growth on trees and flowers.

As a group discuss what happens in nature as the seasons change and how the temperature changes from one season to the next.

The Social Child

You can then use the visual display as a reference point in a dress up game. Have a range of items of clothing in the middle of the circle. Items might include a sun hat, a scarf, short sleeved shirt, a coat, gum boots, shorts…the list goes on.

Children can take turns to select an item of clothing and put it on. The group can then guess when to wear the clothes by using the pictures to sort clothes into season categories. As a follow up, the clothes can be used as dress-ups in the home corner to promote further discussion amongst the children, or you could put on a play about the seasons.

The Active Child

Using music of different tempos, children can use their whole bodies to represent different seasons and weather.

Use soft gentle music as they float around as gentle falling leaves in the wind, or try loud, fast music as they stomp, hop and jump in thick snow. Sounds of insects and baby animals can be used as they emerge from a tiny bud into a big flower in full bloom, stretching out their new fresh leaves and petals to the sun.

The Creative Child

You can use books, photos or collected leaves to look at the different colours of leaves as the seasons change. Discuss the different colours and match to different seasons. Then offer these colours in many shades in paints, pencils, crayons or some other creative medium. Use large group size pieces of paper hung on either a fence, wall or large room divider. Allow children as a group to paint leaves of all shades. Use the artwork as a display to share their learning about seasons with parents and visitors. More decorating ideas for seasons can be found in this article.

More Ideas

Throughout the exploration or seasons you can introduce a variety of poems, songs and nursery rhymes that are linked to different seasons. Here is a list of suggestions to get you started:

Rain, rain go away

The colours of winter

I’m a little butterfly

You are my sunshine

This is the way we dig the soil

Sing a rainbow

Here is a link to the words of the songs, and many other nursery rhymes.

Different children learn new information in different ways so by using a variety of experiences to learn about seasons during preschool circle time you can grab the interest of a variety of children .