Calendar Skills

[hs03842]

What have you done to teach calendar skills?  

Edited December 9, 2020 by JoyKM

[alisha]

For space saving, I really like the idea of a Daily Calendar Notebook. There are so many free options, I'll let you google it and decide what all you want to include.

[gck21]

Our math curriculum (RightStart) also has calendar sections, and we sing the RS songs as well. It may be yours has a section too.

I don't find that we naturally talk about time/the calendar much in our daily life. We aren't that scheduled of a family in the best of times, and of course now we are going nowhere. But I find intensive calendar/weather projects to be very dull (to me at least, I don't know about my kids!). So all I do is print out a monthly calendar (there are a lot of free options here and one of my kids really likes all the quirky "holidays" on this one). I write events/birthdays/classes on their calendar too, because I think that makes time more interesting to them. Then we say the date together every day, and, whenever I feel like it, I ask them calendar questions. A couple times a month, we sing the months of the year, and at the beginning of the new month and on the solstices/equinoxes, I find a poem or picture book for the occasion. The results...well my rising 2nd grader is fine but my rising K still gets the days of the week song wrong. So my method doesn't get immediate results. But it only takes a minute a day or less! 🙂

Edited July 31, 2020 by gck21

[wendyroo]

12 minutes ago, happysmileylady said:

Mostly, we just use a calendar in every day life.  I tend to feel like a calendar, much like a clock, is something that is used and accessed so much in every day life that just by showing them as they have questions, or accessing opportunities to ask them questions and help them figure it out....it doesn't require separate work.

Having said that, there have been situations where their regular math program has practice questions, and when that comes up we just work through it.  

Same.  Those topics naturally come up all the time around here.  How many days until Nana and Papa come?  How many months until my birthday?  Is today tomorrow?  Is today Monday?  Will my half-birthday be on Christmas?

We're constantly looking at the calendar on my desk and counting days; singing the days of the week song, the months of the year song, and the "30 Days Hath September" poem; working math word problems that require knowing how many days are in a week, weeks in a year, days in a regular and leap year, etc.  Just today I was making a count down calendar to let the kids keep track of when we are starting a big flooring project at the end of August.  

Our math curriculum does occasionally cover those topics, but we often skip them because the kids have internalized so many of the concepts already.

[sweet2ndchance]

1 hour ago, OKBud said:

Actually now that I type that, there are probably a thousands calendar songs. 

One of our personal favorites is the Days of the Week song to the tune of The Addams Family lol    ;-)

Also Scratch Garden's Days of the Week video was a hit with my youngest.

 

[ktgrok]

7 hours ago, JoyKM said:

What have you done to teach calendar skills?  I'm looking for space saving ways to go over the date, days/months, weather, etc.  My Kindergartener doesn't know that stuff yet, and I haven't found a way to kind of seamlessly put that in to the other subjects (yet...it's only been a week).  I'm thinking of getting a little flip calendar to do right before reading lessons but want to know what others have done.  

I bought each kid a calendar, and they mark holidays on it, etc. That teaches most of it. And then used The Good and the Beautiful song for months of the year and days of the week memorization. They have videos now on youtube  that also show the seasons change as they sing the months. That helped my 7 year old. 

But things like weather, etc? We just say look, it's raining, or "wow, it's hot out today - so sunny". I have never understood why a workbook is needed for weather, actually. I mean, does your kindergartener really not know what windy/sunny/rainy mean? 

Seriously, buy a calendar for them with cute pictures, fill in your family members' birthdays, holidays, etc. Put on The Good and The Beautiful Kids channel on youtube. Done. 

[Ellie]

11 hours ago, Ktgrok said:

I bought each kid a calendar, and they mark holidays on it, etc. That teaches most of it. And then used The Good and the Beautiful song for months of the year and days of the week memorization. They have videos now on youtube  that also show the seasons change as they sing the months. That helped my 7 year old. 

But things like weather, etc? We just say look, it's raining, or "wow, it's hot out today - so sunny". I have never understood why a workbook is needed for weather, actually. I mean, does your kindergartener really not know what windy/sunny/rainy mean? 

Seriously, buy a calendar for them with cute pictures, fill in your family members' birthdays, holidays, etc. Put on The Good and The Beautiful Kids channel on youtube. Done. 

I'm with Ktgrok on this. It's a natural part of life, which children would learn at home, but since school children are in a sterile environment where many things *must* be taught, there are cute things to do it. Except when my dc were little, there wasn't Youtube or TGATB, so we just talked about the days of the week and the months of the year as they happened.

[hs03842]

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Edited December 9, 2020 by JoyKM

[Emily ZL]

FWIW, I bought a big set up for this (one of those 142+ pieces sets) and had every piece laminated before our first official day of homeschooling. It had a weather circle with an arrow, a big weather graph that we used dry erase markers on, a big perpetual calendar with little squares that attached with Velcro spots in the back that had the dates, and it even had special holiday squares for each holiday. It was so cute. I wouldn't recommend that, haha. It got used for a week and then people kept stealing or ruining my numbers and the babies tore it off the wall and people fought over who's turn it was to graph the weather and whether it was partly sunny or mostly cloudy and I put it in storage and finally threw it out this summer. Sigh. Another expensive Pinterest-perfect idea was not worth it! And then the capper: my kids would say the days of the week or recite the months, and I'd think "well at least I taught them something" and they'd say "I learned the days and the months from Mrs Smith at co-op!" Lol.

[mmasc]

@JoyKM When my kids were that age, we used and loved Confessions of a Homeschooler’s Daily Learning Notebook. I think it’s about $4 and it was the first thing they did every morning and only took about 15 minutes. Sure, we talked about that stuff in daily life, but this was a fun, daily reminder for me and my kids really enjoyed it. I think she has an elementary one, but also one for kindergarten. I did buy a big, cheap outdoor thermometer that we put up outside so they could read the temperature. It was fun and good practice and lumps a lot of skills into a little 15-20 block. 
 

https://www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com/blog/2012/09/elementary-daily-learning-notebook.html