Calendar Area

At the calendar area, children are exposed to many Literacy, Math, and Social Studies concepts. Starting at the left, take a tour of what your child is learning every day at the calendar area.

(Not shown in this photo, are the large posters of the songs or poems we are learning for the week. Students will sing these songs or recite these poems before we participate in our calendar activities. Each week we have new songs and poems and children easily learn them by the end of the week by participating in shared reading and singing.)

*All children do the months of the year by clicking their fingers and saying them in a "rap style". They also complete these sentences. "Last month was... This month is... Next month will be.....".

*The two helpers, one girl and one boy, make an estimate of the blocks that are in the container on the shelf. Each week I add a handful of blocks so their estimate has to be more than the previous week's number. We have ten estimates at the end of the week when we count, then we decide who has the closest guess.

*All children sing the days of the week and then one helper decides what object goes in the empty square on our monthly calendar and one helper decides what number goes in our weekly calendar. (For this month we were making an ABC pattern with apples.) After doing this, one helper unties the shoelaces from the previous day, and one helper ties the shoestrings for the current day.

*I graph the weather in our bar graph and change the temperature on our thermometer. We graph whether the weather is sunny, cloudy, windy, cold, foggy, rainy or snowy.

*I add a tally mark for each day of the schoolyear. We count the tally marks by fives and ones each day.

*Any child may sign the tooth if they have lost a tooth the previous night or day. We keep track of all the teeth lost each month and make a bar graph for the entire year.

*The helpers tell the time on the clock. One helper writes the time using numerals, the other helper writes the time using words.

*Each day we add a penny to our piggy bank. One helper adds the penny and counts the money, the other helper writes the deposit.

*One helper adds a unit to our place value chart. The other helper counts our flats, rods, and units and places that number on the sticky note below the chart to make the number that we counted.

*We recite the seven continents and the five oceans of the world on our world map. We recite the states of the United States and their capitals on our United States map. We learn a new state and its capital each week during the first semester. We learn two new states and capitals during the second semester so that by the end of the year we have learned all 50 states and capitals.

*We add a bunny to our bunny trail each day. The bunny trail will go around our room by the end of the school year. (Each bunny has a number on it and makes an AAAAB,AAAAC, pattern). By using our bunny trail, we can count by ones, fives, and tens.

*We stand and say the pledge of allegiance and then return to our seats, ready for the school day.

*The total time spent on the calendar activities is approximately 15-20 minutes each morning.