Organizing Calendar Time

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.

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

To ensure a solid grasp of time, money, and other areas not covered as well previously
Work on number reasoning (Saxon excels at this, and includes it in Calendar Time (what they call Morning Meeting))
Work on lesson we are all doing together: Grammar, Latin, English from the Roots Up
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

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

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

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