Calendar Confessions {making it work}

I have a confession.  It's really bad.  Especially as a kindergarten teacher.

I am awful at calendar.  And because I'm awful at calendar, my students' number sense was lacking.  Ugh.  Major confession.  Don't tell anyone.

There just never seemed to be time to do calendar first thing in the morning {last year we went immediately into workshop and this year we have specials right away} so I always have to fit it into math.  And I forget.  Last year I was lucky to even get the date changed so one of my personal goals this year was to make my calendar better.  I use this set that I put on magnets to keep on the dry erase board.  You could also use these pieces with velcro dots on a bulletin board or in a pocket chart.

So we do it in a routine...the same way every day.  It's the only way to remember.  We figure out the date and say it all together.  We sing our Addam's Family Days of the Week song.  We sing our Macarena Months of the Year song.

We look at yesterday's "___th day of school" number in the pocket chart and figure out what comes next.  We check to see if it follows the patterns {starts the same as the other numbers in the row & ends the same as the other numbers in the column}.

Then we use our number of the day to count by 5 with tallies.  We whisper count until we get to the fifth slash number and we say those loud.  Then we add sticks to the pocket chart and talk about place value.  We add a dot to our ten frames and practice counting by 10s.

Then we figure out yesterday, today and tomorrow while the meteorologist checks the weather.  We color in our weather graph {by Cara Carroll}, hang our weather photo and sing the weather song.

Whew!  Then it's time for lunch!!!  :)

I'm feeling fairly confident that we're going to know our two-digit numbers this year!!  Woo-hoo!  :)