Calendar

My plan is to start home schooling a preschool program to E in the fall.  Since a new baby is going to liven things up in December, I knew I wanted to have the calendar part of the routine established by September by starting it daily this summer.

The calendar poster was about $3.00 at our local teaching store.  I put it on our freezer, which is a pull out drawer under our refrigerator so it provided lots of room at E's level for our work space.  I highlighted the weekends so we could differentiate the days when Dadda works from when he's home.  Every day, we count the dates already on the calendar, add the next one, sing The Days of the Week, and discuss upcoming events using the words tomorrow, this week, and weekend.  As the curriculum and E grow together, we will add more parts to our calendar time (seasons, graphing weather, counting by 2s, 5s, 10s, pattern of the day, months of the year, etc.)

I made the magnetic dates with my 1" button maker.  I also made some recognizable magnets for places we regularly go and people we see.  

I love that counting the dates is teaching E to go from left to right and where the next line starts when one ends which are important skills for reading.  By the time she is ready to pick up an early reader, this will be a habit for her.  She is also getting daily one-to-one counting (touching each date as we count), number recognition to 31, and days of the week.  For quite awhile now, we've talked about upcoming events, but this makes it more concrete to her.  Yesterday after using the calendar once, she could tell me that tomorrow we were going to the library and the next day we were going to Nana's house.

Calendar time is a small, concentrated, vital burst of math in a quick amount of time.