Calendar time

I'm a teacher.  I really can't help it.  It's just who I am.  I love learning whether it's math-related or not.  I love the real-life, relatable kind of learning! One of the many reasons I decided to stay at home full time with my kiddos was to impact those learning-packed first 5 years of life. I think we all want this, really.  So, as a teacher - I feel the need to share everything so other Mommas can steal ideas if they want :)

Charlotte is 3 1/2 and we've begun to realize that she doesn't have a really good grasp of time as far as days of the week, etc.  Calendars are a great thing for young kids, so I headed to Lakeshore Learning and got this heavy-duty calendar.  You could totally make one yourself, but I'm thinking this is going to be something we use for a long time in our house, so I decided to buy one that will last. I hung it on our front door (metal) with 3 heavy-duty clips.

We've been working on moving our "today" marker each day and counting the days, saying the day of the week, etc.  Charlotte especially likes seeing the different colored days for the weekends so she knows when Daddy gets to stay home all day with us!  We're just starting so I'm keeping it kind of simple this first month, but we've put a marker on "Vacation" and one this week to show when we're going to a friend's house.  We've worked on counting to see how many days there are until vacation.  This is an early math skill (to learn not to count today but to count "jumps" forward).

Another big reason I thought a calendar would be great is that Charlotte has mastered numbers 1-10 and most of her 11-20 numbers, but not all of them.  A calendar is a great way to work on numbers 1-31 in a really natural way :)

After we figured out what day it was today (the 14th) we used an empty glass container (this is an empty bouillon container).  Glass works well because you can see through it.  We spent awhile just counting 14 things into the container over and over again.  I wrote 14 on the container with a vis-a-vis pen (wet erase) marker so we can change the number each day.

everyone is counting 14 goldfish

We've filled it with 14 pretzels

14 berry kix

Here is Charlotte counting 14 fruit snacks

After our 14 container, the girls just did some counting.  Here's a video of Charlotte counting.  She omits 15 and 20 (which is totally normal).  She also doesn't get to "30" but instead uses a pattern to count to "twenty-ten" and beyond.  This is really common and exactly why we're doing this daily counting :)

For anyone with more than 1 kid, obviously any learning has to be differentiated so that both ages are learning something.  It was easier when I just had to think about what Charlotte was learning.  Adelyn is jumping right into the counting.  She just turned 2 last week.  What am I working on with her?  We're learning to count (1-10 will be our focus) and one-to-one correspondence.  This is when you point to 1 thing for every 1 number you say.  Charlotte has mastered this, but Adelyn will hopefully be learning this through our calendar time :)

This is all adapted from the idea of calendar math, which is used in preschools and elementary schools. It's something that is SO easy to do at home and calendars can a skill that can be adapted to a variety of ages.  You can add your family's events, etc so everyone is involved!