We usually start out by moving our little "Alligator" to the right Day of the Week. We put the date on, and work on saying the entire date "Today is Tuesday, December 8th." We move the Today, Tomorrow & Yesterday cards to the right place. Next is the weather. My son loves to open the doors and blinds to check the weather. We put the right weather card on and then mark our weather graph with a dry erase marker. We don't always talk about what season it is, usually only once every other week. After the weather we practice saying our address and phone number. My son pretends to write it by making scribbles on the lines.
Then we fold it up and put it away. Since it is a cardboard trifold and really skinny, it fits perfectly between my wall and washing machine. This way, it's out of sight and my 1 yr old can't mess with it. I move the alligator to the top so the board folds up smaller, but other than that we leave everything on there for the next day.
How I Made the Calendar
Everything I used was from these 2 sites. Most of it is from CoaH. You will find everything you need for free under her Calendar Time link. I wanted something a little different for the month and numbers portion. I found this one on teacherspayteachers. It is a free PDF by Melissa Obryan.
Once I found everything and had it printed out, I bought a cardboard Tri-fold Display Board, velcro sticky dots, and a brass fastner for the Seasons wheel. I cut it all out and laminated everything. (This is going to be getting a lot of use). Be sure that when you laminate to only laminate one side of the things you are glueing down. I don't think glue sticks work well on laminated surfaces. You can do this by putting two pages back to back, run it through the laminator and then cut to the very edge of the paper. The two pages will separate and the lamination will stay on the front side, leaving the back side regular paper, perfect for glueing! Before I glued everything down, I laid it all out on the board and arranged it and spaced it all. The most time consuming part was making the outline for where the date cards go. (See picture below. It's hard to see the pencil lines so I highlighted them on the picture. The blue lines are not actually on our board). Once I had it arranged exactly how I wanted, I very carefully glued everything on. Then I added the velcro dots for the dates, Today, Tomorrow & Yesterday, and What's the Weather Today (also in picture below).
And that's it!! It took maybe 3-4 hours total to do everything, I spaced it out over a few days. Both my 3yr old and 1yr old love it!
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