I hear the same thing over and over again from fellow teachers: "I am so tired of calendar!" "The kids are SO bored!" "We do the same thing every day!" But not in our classroom! My kids' favorite part of the day is calendar. There are so many skills that can be taught during calendar time. Here are 5 ideas that I often use to make calendar time more engaging!
Who can ignore this staple of a calendar in an Early Childhood classroom? The calendar is the focal point on almost all calendar walls I have seen. It has many purposes: days of the week, the month, and numbers 1-31. But the part that we get the most out of is patterning the days on our calendar. I use the Classroom Calendar Days of the Year to achieve this. On the first of the month I will decide what pattern I am going to use. Then, as we are adding days to the calendar, the students must first identify what the pattern is. Their next step is to extend the pattern. I find the students do pretty well on identifying, so as the year progresses, I increase the difficulty.
Shop It
Once we figure out the date, we use our Ten Frame Math Magnets to determine the place value of the date. The kiddos and I then break the number down together. We spell the number down, tally the number, and then count forward and backwards. We also decide the number that comes before and after. My favorite part is figuring out place value with ten frames. The giant ten frames makes it very easy for the students to see the groups of ten.
Shop It
Once we do the calendar we have our class "meteorologist" (who is our student of the day) look outside to determine what the temperature is and what the weather is doing. My kids love being the meteorologist because I give them a microphone to talk into! As they are giving the weather report, I manipulate the bulletin board. I took the "today is" arrows from the Weather Mini Bulletin Board Set and hot glued them onto clothes pins so we can move them every day. Then we used the circle sunny/cloudy pieces and made a graph. Every day we write the date on a post-it and put it on the graph.
Shop It
After the Student of the Day hangs up the microphone they get to come lead our favorite part of calendar time, The Name Game. I write their name on top of the bulletin board and we get started. We go letter by letter, identifying if each letter is a vowel or consonant. As we identify each letter, we put circles on our Ten Frame Math Magnets. We have it flipped over to make it into a graph. Each student gets a day to be the center of attention and they love learning about each of their friends' names. Bonus! We also are working on their letters and sounds!
As we are doing "The Name Game" I give my students their own Ten Frame and a set of Themed Mini Erasers. We add the erasers piece by piece as I am doing it on the bulletin board. When the students are doing it with me, it cuts down on time for them to be "off". Changing out the erasers we use also keeps things new and exciting for students.
Shop It