I { heart } calendar time….now

Ok ~ let’s face it!  Whether we want to admit it or not there’s a part in your school day you might not LOVE.  For years for me it was calendar time.  In fact last year at some point I just stopped doing it.  { gasp } The horror! 

LOL

 I always felt like it was the same thing ~ ~ blah! blah! blah!

Well thanks to my sweet, helpful friend Traci over at Dragonflies in First I seriously LOVE calendar time.  I read one of her blog posts and grabbed her awesome freebie and now – voila!  I feel like a new woman!  Here is the link directly to her { calendar freebie }.  Traci has completely transformed the way that I approach my calendar time.  Our district this year is diving right into the common core and so many of the features of Traci’s calendar freebie are right on!  My kids love it and so do I…they are all actively engaged and I’m NOT wasting paper…a win! win!

So here are the interactive boards that they kids write on during calendar time.  I laminated them at home but first mounted them to pieces of thin cardboard/cardstock.  The thin pens will work on this not the fat ones and of course I added a little pom pom eraser like Traci did too. 

I share my calendar board with my skill of the day ( that is what is written on the bunting – skill )  One of the things I didn’t like also about calendar was switching the month headers and numbers each month.  As you can see the kids write the numeral date above.  We also move the clip for the days of the week and months of the year.

As you can see the kids follow along with the 10 frames, date, days – yesterday/tomorrow/tomorrow, tens and ones, and we do tally marks instead of money.  All I can say is Traci is brilliant!!!!

The pics are a bit blurry but you get the idea!  The kids are actively participating and they really like it.  There is also a spot for the one less/ one more ten less/ten more spot too.  We need to be in school for a higher number of days to get to that part.

**There are only 3 ten frames so for that part we keep track of the days of the month but we will add days in school for the 10 less/10 more part.

Oh and I won’t lie I spent about 5 minutes fixing this… this afternoon.  It will happen ~ just expect it.

So what are you waiting for – train your kiddos and grab this awesome freebie my friends.  Oh BTW if anyone knows of a song to 120 let me know in the comments.  Now that is a standard I would love a song instead of just chanting the numbers with a few claps and snaps every so often. :o)