We are nearing the end of January 2012 and I finally finished my classroom calendar. It took awhile, but it was definitely worth the wait. Having an interactive calendar is a great way to get the students involved in learning the year, seasons, months, days...etc...If you are lucky to have a SmartBoard or a projector in your classroom, head on over to
Starfall.com where an interactive/hands-on calendar is available everyday! Once the kids get used to using it, you can ask them more questions. For example: how many Monday's are in January? or What day of the week is our 100th ay of school?
Since I am a computer teacher this year and I don't really do much with calendars (besides in the beginning of the year when I have each student visit Starfall.com). I decided to create my own little "foldable" calendars.
Mr. Printables is a site with "oodles of free printables for kids." The site was recently updated! Exploring the site I managed to find their calendar section, where they have these things called Monthters. They are these monthly monsters calendars that fold to a small pocket size and stretches to a long monthly calendar! Because I don't really like monsters. I edited the image using Pixelator (a Mac program) and changed all the monthly monters into dogs!
I think I did a pretty good job, but the credit of the design and the idea definitely goes to Mr. Printables! Today is January 30th, so on my foldable calendar I will use a sharpie and outline the number. You can kind of see from the picture, but each day of the week I outline the date in a sharpie so that when my students ask "What is today's date?" I can easily look over to the wall and tell them.
