Calendar Skills Educational Resources

Tracking time is an important skill for students to develop early on in order to ensure success later in life. Creating a daily schedule starts with understanding the days, weeks, and months of the year, and what each of these factors mean for planning. Encourage students to create and decorate their own calendars to keep these activities engaging.

It can be daunting for new learners to understand the new concept of a calendar. We see five weeks of seven days. They see 35 spaces in a grid, some with numbers, some without.
Teaching your students to understand the days, weeks, and months on a calendar not only gives them a necessary skill, but also gives you an avenue to introduce new concepts like comparing weather on specific days and scheduling.
As with many early learning concepts, learning the calendar comes down to repetition and memorization. Make calendar time a part of their daily routine. Start with the smallest part, teaching them the days of the week. You can emphasize things that will happen in the future with future tense verbs.
There are many songs you can use, as well as many of the resources provided by Education.com that could help with this. Each day, show them the current day in a single week calendar so they can see where it fits with the rest of the days.
Once your students have memorized the days of the week, broaden your calendar to include the full month. Start teaching the months of the year using the same strategies you used for the days of the week. Now, every day, you will still mention the day of the week, but you’ll be using a full month calendar, reinforcing the current month as well.
Once your students understand how to read the calendar, you can begin to introduce new concepts building on this, including seasons, weekdays and weekends, and simple calendar math.