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Teaching the Calendar I write from my own experience: the easiest and most effective way to teach children about the calendar is to buy them a calendar of their own. From the time my children were toddlers I kept a "communal" calendar on the refrigerator. This calendar was simply a large piece of paper, drawn on with markers, to show the month we were in. Important days were noted with stickers or drawn images, and each morning one of my children would mark an X over the previous day and read aloud the current month and day. To learn the days of the week (Sunday, Monday, etc.), I had my children recite them each day. Repetition works. We would sing the days, chant the days, and even clap to the days. On grumpy days we would groan out the days, deliberately sounding as awful as humanly possible. Once they knew the days of the week, we repeated our singing, chanting, and groaning with the months of the year. At this writing, my children are ages seven and nine. Both keep calendars in their bedrooms and they both learned about the calendar, and the year, in the way I've described above. When each had their math lessons regarding the calendar, neither of them had any problems with the material I presented to them. In fact, they breezed through the workbook lessons, showing me that they picked up a lot more about the workings of the year than I had originally thought. |