Classroom Calendar

One of the first projects I tackled during preparation for homeschool was the classroom calendar. Calendars are a wonderful way to teach so many different things - all in one simple activity.

Calendars:

• Center your day as an opening activity that all ages can participate and understand
• Open discussions about time, days of the week, and scheduling
• Can include holidays, moon phases, birthdays, and more
• Easily adapt to include discussions around the weather and seasons
• Aid in planning and time management

Every school day we will review the calendar by discussing today's date, the day of the week, yesterday and tomorrow's day of the week, along with the current weather, season, and moon phase.

Each child will have a journal in which they will record however much of this information as they choose. If the moon interests one, they can dive deeper. Or maybe the weather patterns, or observing the sky and clouds interests another. Totally up to each child.

Now for the fun part... shopping!

It turned out hard to find a perpetual calendar that was not visually offensive, had all the features I was looking for, and was affordable! I found an absolutely beautiful perpetual calendar on Etsy, but we decided we weren't ready to spend that much money at this point, but it does appear to be a lot of calendar for the money and well worth the investment if you're looking for a calendar to keep for years to come.

In the end I discovered a black pocket calendar at Michael's. I had already nabbed some bilingual calendar days and months from the dollar bin at Target with a simple, clean design. I honestly abhor the crazy visual clutter that most mainstream classrooms pick up, so I'm really hoping to keep all of our supplies as calmly simplistic as possible, closer aligned to a Waldorf classroom.

I'd love to hear about your experiences with classroom calendars. Do you use one? Anything you use them for that I didn't cover in the above? Please share!