Calendar Time

I found out the importance of teaching calendar time when I was teaching in a special ed. classroom.  My mentor told me it was the best way to cover multiple IEPs (individual education plans) in a short amount of time and she was right.  With the right calendar time, you cover lots of math, some science and social studies and can even introduce new vocabulary.  It like higher level circle time.  Anyway, I thought I'd walk you through what we do for our calendar time.

First of all, Jovi is almost always the "handy dandy helper" (a title she got from apple creek preschool).  Occasionally I get to be the handy dandy helper and she is the teacher telling me what to do, just for variety.  The first thing we do is sing our months of the year song.  (Oh, jovi was a super, cowboy, cop?  in the pictures)



Next she finds what day it is and moves the daily marker to that date. and we work on saying the date in the right order.


Then we sing the days of the week song and fill out our today is..., tomorrow will be..., yesterday was... chart.


Next we graph the weather and I ask her a few graph reading questions.


After that we play hundred chart games. There are SO many things you can do with a hundred chart. Jovi is working on number recognition above 20 so we play find the number, I give her a number and she has to point to it on the chart. She loves skip counting by ten. I will probably add skip counting by 5s and then 2s in the next few months. Occasionally I have her count all the way to 100. She also practices counting backwards using the board. Once I teach her addition and subtraction using a number line she can do that on a hundreds chart too.



I've already added talking about place value, by using something like this
We use the day of the month so we never get into the hundreds, but I might change how we do that in the future.

Other things I may add in the future are talking about odd and even using the day of the month and introducing daily/weekly vocabulary. I'll be putting up some wall maps in the future and I might add some geography as part of our calendar time, too. I might introduce some word families during calendar time once Jovi is ready for that.  Really, calendar time can be involved and as long as you and your child want. We have fun with our calendar time right now.