Learning the calendar and the components of the calendar is considered a standard of measurement that kindergarten students are expected to learn. Students should be able to identify days of the week, months of the year and seasons.
Books
Cookie’s Week by Cindy Ward and illustrated by Tomie dePaola is a story about a very mischievous cat. Students will read the story and follow Cookie through different adventures, one for each day of the week.
Today is Monday, written and illustrated by Eric Carle, is a book that serves a different tasty food dish daily and introduces students to the days of the week. On Sunday, children from all over the world come together to eat the delicious food.
Pepper’s Journal: A Kitten’s First Year by Stuart J. Murphy, illustrator Marsha Winborn, is a story whereLisa keeps a journal about her new kitten while readers learn about days, weeks, months, and years as they follow her and her kittens first year.
A Child’s Calendar by John Updike and illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman is a book of poems written that chronicle the typical events and weather for each of the twelve months.
The Turning of the Year, written by Bill Martin Jr. and illustrated by Greg Shed is a clever book of rhyming text that describes the months of the year by their common characteristics.
Websites
Starfall is a website that lets students create their own calendar. It is full of animation and a narrator identifies the days of the week while the students are about to fill in missing dates and when asked, recognize specific dates.
Roy the Zebra-days is an animated games where students help a zebra get ready for bed by dragging and dropping the days of the week in the correct order. The site lists some of the days and the student has to fill in the blanks.
Roy the Zebra-months is the same site as Roy the Zebra-days but this time the student plays with the names of the months. Students must fill in the blanks for missing months and place them in the correct order.
This site combines knowledge of days, seasons and holidays. Students are given a list of all three and next to the names have to determine whether the name is a day, a season, or a holiday.
In order to familiarize students with the common characteristics of the seasons, this site provides an animated games that pictorially shows the characteristics and students participate in common seasonal activities such as, raking leaving, mowing the grass, shoveling snow and watering flowers.
Additional Resources
- Childland provides a collaboration of teacher’s tools for teaching the days and months. The booklet includes numerous songs, poems, teaching ideas, and printables all related to calendar.
- This site was designed to provide resources for ESL students but it also has many valuable resources that would be beneficial to all students. The link takes you to a site with hundreds of worksheets available for teaching the days of the week.
- Mrs. Meacham’s site is a great resource for teachers to have a variety of ways for teaching Calendar Math. One of her ideas is to create a calendar binder for each student. Using the website, she takes you through how to make the binders, use them effectively, and the benefits for students.