Why you should be doing calendar with your young children

Item 4 works excellent if you are not looking for something so permanent and is moveable. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

10 to 15 minutes a day is all you need to help your child learn their numbers, letters, months, days of the week, years, seasons, shapes, music, and colors!

A calendar and weekly focus board are incredible tools to help your child understand these concepts without feeling overwhelmed.

In my several years of preschool teaching, I have learned that children learn best through repetitive exposure. Your child may not even know how to count, but by doing calendar everyday, counting, and pointing to the numbers as you go, you are continually working on number recognition, and one day it will just click.

Let me walk you through how I do the calendar.

First, start with a fun song. My calendar and circle time playlist is linked here.

Then we get into the following.

• "What month are we in?"
• "Let's spell that month together! 'F-E-B-R -U-A-R-Y'"
• Then I will pull out my month cards from this calendar set and show off that card during the month's song on this playlist.
• "Now let's get our counting googles on and count to what day we are on"
• "Can anyone tell me what day of the week our number landed on?"
• Then we will proceed to sing the days of the week song found on this playlist. Point to each day of the week as you sing. Better yet, have your children switch off on who gets to point!
• After we find out what day of the week it is, we spell this out and point to each letter as we do.
• Then I ask, "If today is Friday, what was yesterday? If today is Friday, what is tomorrow?"
• Then I will grab our lap whiteboards and washable dry erase markers and have each child write the full date, i.e., Saturday, February 20th, 2021
• For my younger children, I write everything in yellow and then have them trace it. If that is too difficult, I help them write by doing hand over hand.

From there, we move to our weekly focus board, where we go over our letter, number, shape, and color for the week!

• When reviewing our letter, I ask if they can think of any words that start with that letter. I'll then write them out and say each letter as I write it.
• I will then ask them to write the letter and number on their whiteboards.
• I will then have them count any objects they like (small toy cars, action figures, etc.) to correlate to our number for the week.
• We then wrap it up by talking about the weather and singing our weather song on this playlist.

Just by going over the calendar, even it seems like they aren't getting it, you are teaching them. Sometimes all kids need is repetitive exposure for things to click!

All you need to worry about is having fun when doing it!