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Organizing Calendar Time

July 30, 2013 Ticia 16 Comments

If you’ve ever taught or been in a preschool to about third grade classroom they all have calendar time.  I have tried over and over again to enact a good calendar time, but I’ve not been consistent with it, and calendar time is worthless if you’re not consistent.

Calendar time space

This year I’m using Saxon Math, long story why I’ve switched off of Math U See, but I have some disagreements with choices they’ve made for their curriculum.  One of the key components for Saxon Math in the primary years is their calendar time, so I’m resurrecting it yet again, but I’m going to organize it better.

 

Reasons I think Calendar Time fell apart last year

  • too much writing required
  • I hadn’t put together the notebooks well, so it took too much time to find stuff
  • no clear goals

To counter that last one:

Goals for Calendar Time this year

  1. To ensure a solid grasp of time, money, and other areas not covered as well previously
  2. Work on number reasoning (Saxon excels at this, and includes it in Calendar Time (what they call Morning Meeting))
  3. Work on lesson we are all doing together: Grammar, Latin, English from the Roots Up
  4. Plan the schedule for the day (my goal will be to start school at 9am sharp)

planning supplies

This year I am using Illuminations Year 1 {affiliate link} to help me with organization, lesson plans, and because it’s just really really cool (yes you will hear more on this).  Part of its schedule includes using English from the Roots Up {affiliate link} 2 days a week.  The other two days we will be using Song School Latin Teacher’s Edition {affiliate link, you really only need the student edition, I got the teacher’s for the extra word searches in the back}.

 

What our Calendar Time area looks like this year

calendar time shelf

I’m using another magazine box (same ones from my organizing books post) to hold the latin, English from the Roots Up, and Easy Grammar {affiliate link}

Saxon math manual, since that has the info for our morning meeting

calendar cards, dice, latin word cards

writing utensils

shelf for toy money, which the kids were happily playing store with while I cleaned

and there’s space to add in anything else I’ve forgotten

 

calendar time area

The actual planned space for it, here’s what is there and how I’m going to use it:

laminated lined paper: I’m trying to decide if I’ll have the kids write or not for our calendar time because I’m planning on dramatically upping the required writing, and this may be an area I don’t want the fight.  If so, then I will write it all up on this.

graph paper: I found this giant chart tablet of graph paper at a teacher supply store ages ago, and Jeff and I have now gone through 3 of them in various asundry projects, none of them related to school.  This is only the second sheet used for school work.

hundreds board: there is so much math you can do from just a simple hundreds board, and I’m sure we’ll be playing around with this somewhat.  We certainly did last year

Calendar: because they still occasionally get the days/months messed up.

 

Theoretical Calendar Time Schedule

  1. Morning meeting: calendar, money cup, problem of the day, number of the day, pattern of the day (from Saxon) (every day)
  2. Either Latin or English from the Roots Up, alternating every other day
  3. Easy Grammar (every day)
  4. Daily schedule (every day)
  5. something I’m sure I’m forgetting right now

 

Other Calendar Time posts

Our Calendar time (last year’s post)

Our Morning Time (our preschool calendar time)

Farm Fresh Adventures

Our Aussie Homeschool

The Teacher Wife

homeschool, math, organization Illuminations

Comments

  1. Lisa @ Farm Fresh Adventures says

    July 30, 2013 at 2:20 pm

    Ticia, I am soooooooo guilty about not staying on top of calendar time. I truly think I just run OUT of time and then I suddenly remember it. This year we (and by we I mean me) are working on staying on a tighter schedule when it comes to getting up in the morning because I think that is where we lost time. I allowed too much “sleep in” time and then scrambled to get the morning stuff done before we started school.

    Reply
    • Ticia says

      July 30, 2013 at 4:50 pm

      I’m the same way. I get better for a bit (usually the start of school) and then it gets worse.

      I did so much better with it when I was teaching, then I had an enforced schedule.

    • Ticia says

      July 30, 2013 at 4:50 pm

      Oh, and I LOVE your profile picture, it’s super cute.

  2. Lindsay @ BytesofMemory says

    July 30, 2013 at 5:12 pm

    Looks like fun! We are going to revamp our calendar time too 🙂

    Reply
    • Ticia says

      July 30, 2013 at 5:25 pm

      Fingers crossed I keep it up.

  3. maryanne @ mama smiles says

    July 30, 2013 at 5:48 pm

    Looks like you have a great system set up!

    Reply
  4. Natalie says

    July 30, 2013 at 7:01 pm

    Oh, so now I know that these strange worksheets Anna brings home every week must be calendar time! I am jealous that your kids are starting with the second language – contemplating if we should get more consistent with the second language again…

    Reply
    • Ticia says

      July 31, 2013 at 8:08 am

      Ha! Probably so, calendar time is great because of the wide variety of things you can cover in that time. I remember we used to cover a little bit of everything.
      We’ll see how we do with our second language…. Fingers crossed.

  5. Claire says

    July 31, 2013 at 3:04 am

    Looks like a good plan. I think I might need calendar time. I still (at 38) don’t know how many days are in a year!

    Reply
    • Ticia says

      July 31, 2013 at 8:09 am

      I have to admit to taking a very long time to learn how many days each month has.

Trackbacks

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    August 12, 2013 at 8:19 am

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Ticia Adventures in Mommydom Hi, I'm Ticia! This is the adventures of my family in life and learning. Follow along with us as we share our adventures. We're having a lot of fun and learning as we go.

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