When I was a preschool teacher, I never did “calendar” with my students, ever. Of course, the majority of my years were spent with infants and toddlers, but even my time with three and four year olds was in a play-based program where we had a small group time that focused on reading books, singing songs and sharing stories, not drilling and memorizing information as I believe young children will learn what they need to know by playing, conversing, singing and reading.
From my parenting experience, I now know that “calendar” is an integral part of pretty much every preschool and kindergarten classroom where the children are gathered together and the date is discussed, the days of the week are drilled as are the months of the year and one special child each day gets to mark the day on the calendar.
While I don’t really agree with the system of memorization and forced teaching of such an abstract concept (time is something few three and four year olds really understand), I do see some of the benefits to it in group settings such as learning turn taking, self-control and listening skills, these skills can easily be taught while talking about more concrete ideas.
When I decided to undertake homeschooling my girls, one of the supplies I purchased was a large desk calendar. I never intend to drill the calendar concept, but it is something that has become part of our regular school routine.
Each day we quickly talk about what date it is (“today is Friday, August 29, 2014”) as I point to the words on the calendar and the girls take turns putting sticky notes on each day (I intend to use the back of the paper for art projects later so didn’t want to write all over it!). We then count how many days we’ve had in the month, I have Sugarplum lead this part since Honeybun already knows how to count well (and while Sugarplum can rattle off numbers up to I don’t know how high and understands the concept of one-to-one correspondence, she has trouble pointing and counting higher numbers as her pointing usually moves faster than her counting).
We sing the days of the week sing while I point to the days (hoping she will learn to recognize the first letters of each day and remember them) then we sing the months of the year (which i wrote on the back of the calendar). And then we move on, that’s it. Nothing too formal, the girls stand around while we do it. No taking turns, sitting still, being quite, waiting too long. We review what they need to know and off we go, onto other things.
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