Check out the second and third parts of this series–Part 2: Learning Board and Part 3: Letter Activities.
When my oldest was roughly three and a half I knew he needed…more. More structure to his day, more routine, more consistency, and more mom time.
All in four months we moved into a new house, our oldest turned into an emotional three-year-old, and we had Baby #3, all of which really threw off my groove. I spent the later half of 2019 relearning how to function with three little ones instead of two, and so at the first of 2020 we were ready for…more.
And so I began an official Calendar Time, and today I’m here to share it with you.
Step One: Gather Supplies
I shopped around for a calendar for quite a while before finally settling on this pocket calendar from Amazon:
I chose this one for two big reasons: First, the fonts are easy to read. I can’t tell you how many school and kid calendars I found with swirly, fancy, or funky fonts, all of which are very difficult to read. I wanted my boys to be able to understand this calendar, and as my oldest already knew some of his letters, I wanted him to recognize them here.
Second, I chose this calendar for the pockets. A lot of school calendars have velcro backs, but pockets are a lot more versatile. Besides slipping holidays behind the numbers instead of replacing them, I also planned to add appointments, family events, and other items to our calendar, and the pockets made that totally possible.
Besides the calendar itself, I added a few other necessary items to my Calendar Time kit:
First, Pointing Sticks. I just so happened to have on hand a bunch of 12-inch narrow dowels. The bottom of the calendar has a big, covered pocket, typically for storing extra calendar pieces, but it was the perfect fit to store our Pointing Sticks.
Second, the Today Mark, as we call it. I measured this one to be slightly taller than the holiday cards so that it would still be visible even behind them. Then I cut out the tag from red cardstock, wrote “Today” across the top with a sharpie, and laminated it.
The Today Mark goes into the current day (no duh!) and is moved every morning at the start of our Calendar Time. The whole point of the calendar was to provide my son with some structure, and marking the actual date helps him to visually see exactly what’s happening on that particular day. Seriously, Calendar Time totally wouldn’t work for us at all without that critical Today Mark.
Third, a year mark. I printed out the current year and then I put it in the very top of the calendar next to the month name.
Fourth, extra calendar pieces.
This calendar set had nearly everything I wanted and more, in fact, quite a bit more. It had a wide variety of religious holidays, some of which I don’t know or celebrate. But still, I put those cards to good use. I flipped them over to the back and wrote whatever personalized event I wanted with a sharpie marker, and as they were already the correct size to fit in the pockets, they were all ready to go. The personalized events I added are as follows:
- “Joy School” (our weekly get-together with my two best friends and their kids)
- “Lunch with Dad at Work” (We used to have a family tradition of visiting my husband at work for lunch on the last Friday of every month, something my boys really looked forward to and they loved marking and seeing on their calendar. Now, due to Covid, he works from home and this card is now useless to us. Thanks a lot, you stupid Corona Virus.)
- “Cunningham Family Night” (our monthly family gatherings with my in-laws)
- “Montgomery Family Night” (our monthly family gatherings with my extended family)
- “Mom and Dad’s Anniversary” (we have a tradition of visiting the temple we were married in, taking a family picture, and enjoying donuts there, which is why my boys know and enjoy that day…for the donuts, of course)
- “General Conference” (a semiannual religious event for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints where our prophet and other leaders speak to the entire church population as a whole)
- “Vacation Start/End” (these are two separate cards; the “Start” card has a forward-pointing arrow and the “End” card has a backward facing one, so my boys can clearly see when we are leaving and coming home from any trips)
These are the basics that I made first, although I still have plenty of unused cards to use for future events as well. I also occasionally make temporary tags to slip into the pockets.
For example, we got new sod laid down earlier this spring and my overexcited boys asked me every single day if it had grown enough now to run and play on (I can’t blame them; I was excited about it too). So instead of battling back their daily questions, I made a little tag out of green construction paper, wrote a big G on it (for “grass,” get it?) and put it in the day two-weeks out from the installation. Then every morning during our calendar time they could clearly see when “Grass Day,” was, as we called it, and how soon it would be here.
Another example: My husband promised the boys a backyard campout this summer and so I made another temporary card for that, also out of basic construction paper. Even more so than with the grass, they were so excited to watch our Today mark move closer and closer to that special campout tag.
Finally, I made the three most important tags of all: Movie Tags.
I never wanted to be a screen family and I really try hard to limit my boys’ screen time (with varying degrees of success). At the very least, I taught them from a very young age that we don’t watch movies except during the baby’s naptime; during the rest of the day we turn off the screens. My boys super know that rule, good and well.
Further, I had established a good pattern of only letting them watch movies every other day. For a while I could say, “We watched a movie yesterday, so no movies today,” and since they understood that was our rule, that was usually acceptable (except when the emotional threenager reared his angry head, of course).
But after Baby #3 was born, most of that went out the window and I let my boys watch movies every single day. It was a necessity for me, at the time, with a new baby, and I spent those precious two hours of baby’s naptime every afternoon napping myself. And I don’t regret that.
But it did introduce that bad habit of the daily movies, which at this point I was ready to correct and go back to our previous every-other-day schedule.
And so I created the Movie Tags. I made three. They are as tall as holiday cards, but much thinner. I used black cardstock and stuck a white letter M sticker on the top of each one (for “movie,” get it?) and then laminated them.
These movie tags move every single week. On Mondays, during our first Calendar Time of the week, I analyze the upcoming week and choose the Movie Days according to our schedule. I try to place them on days that we aren’t going anywhere else, both to guarantee that we’ll actually be home that day and to fill those not-busy days. At first, when I had three movie tags, we had Movie Days typically on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. After a few months I was ready to drop one of those days and now we have two Movie Days a week, which is usually Tuesday and Friday.
(Weekends are kind of a wild card, as far as movies go, although we still keep the strict only-during-naptime rule. My husband often wants to enjoy a movie with his boys on Saturday or Sunday, or sometimes both, which is perfectly allowable. In fact, I love that he’s so involved in their movie-watching. He wants to have that experience with them and to share his childhood favorites, where I, unfortunately use those movies just as a babysitter while I get my much-needed alone and rest time.)
Having those Movie Tags changed my life in such a good way. I remember the days when the very first thing I heard every morning was, “Can I watch a movie today? Can I? Can I watch a movie? Can I watch a movie today?” And inevitably, I’d often get some…uh…rather unpleasant push-back when I had to say no. (Threenager, remember? I honestly thought the internet was just being overly dramatic when I first saw the term “threenager” pop up, but then my son actually turned three and I was suddenly like, “Oh, I get it now. He is as emotional and stubborn as a teenager!”)
But as soon as my calendar and Movie Tags went up, all I had to say was, “Go check if there’s a Movie Tag today.” And off he’d scramble to check the calendar. Sometimes he’d cheer to see that little black tag on the current day, or sometimes he’d dejectedly grumble if it wasn’t there and walk away. But the glorious part of it all is that I didn’t have to be the bad guy. Hooray, hooray, hooray!
Our Typical Calendar Time
I shoot for doing our Calendar Time every weekday, but every now and then we have to rush out the door in the morning and it doesn’t happen. That being said, even on rough weeks we still get it in three or four times out of the five. No, I don’t do Calendar Time on Saturday or Sunday, but I still change the Today Mark so that my boys can look and see what’s going on that day.
- First, we move the Today Mark and say the date. “Today is,” I say, and my boys repeat after me, pointing to each spot as I point to it too, “Monday, September 15th 2020.” Yes, I point to each the weekday name, the month name, the numbered card, and then the year, so they can see exactly what I’m saying and where I got that information.
- Second, we count up to the date, pointing to each numbered day as we go. This has worked wonders in not only teaching my boys to count, but in helping them recognize numbers.
- Third, we review the upcoming events. I point out the Movie Tags for that week, our Joy School card (which I also move weekly along with the Movie Tags), and any birthdays, holidays, or other events coming up for that entire month.
- Fourth, we sing the days of the week song. I learned to sing to the tune of “Alouette” like this: “Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, then we start again!” Simple, fast, effective. And, of course, we point along the top of the calendar at the daily names as we sing it.
- Fifth, we sing the months of the year song. This one I sing to the tune of “Ten Little Indians” like this: “January, February, March and April, May, June, July and August, September, October, November, December. These are the months of the year.” We pause and make a big deal of pointing to the current month when we sing it in the song.
And boom. Done with Calendar Time.
I immediately follow Calendar Time with our Learning Board, which I will describe in Part 2 (see the link for that article at the top and bottom of this post).
Benefits of Calendar Time
First, I already described above how easy our Calendar made our movie days. Seriously, it was a life saver.
Second, my boys are aware of all the plans/events/activities coming up and never feel like something is being sprung on them. My oldest struggled with this for a while and didn’t respond well to spontaneous outings. But these were only spontaneous to him, of course, as I’d known long in advance when our extended-family gatherings were happening, and that sort of thing. But now that he knows the entire month’s worth of events and reviews them daily, so he knows what to expect and when.
Third, it gives our day that structure and routine that my boys so desperately needed. We usually do our Calendar Time first thing in the morning after we eat breakfast and get dressed, so we start our day together and by setting up expectations of what’s going on that day and what’s coming up later. And then we are ready for the rest of the day!
Fourth, birthdays and holidays have a lot more meaning after marking them on our calendar and watching them get closer and closer every day. Even little holidays like Labor Day we always discuss will be a day that Dad has off of work so we get to be together as a family, and even that simple, daily statement makes it a lot more meaningful.
Fifth, my boys have thrived on the mental stimulation of Calendar Time, both the counting and learning the days of the week, that sort of thing. This goes hand-in-hand with our Learning Board. Like I stated above, my boys have learned to count all the way up to thirty and they recognize numbers so much better having looked at our calendar every day.
Overall, I’m super sold on the daily Calendar Time routine. It’s short, simple, easy, and offers a lot of great benefits.
Whenever we sit down for our Calendar Time, we immediately follow it by reviewing our Learning Board. Check out how I set up and do our daily Learning Board in the following post: How to Pre-Preschool–Part 2: Learning Board. Or see Part 3 of this series, Letter of the Week Activities.
