Creating a Calendar Scroll

My genius teaching partner came up with this idea and I simply made the papers to go with it. We are teaching our students about time and calendars right now and many are struggling with the idea that one month flows into another and does not simply start over again with Sunday. She wanted a way to have them SEE how the months fit together and came up with this idea. I, of course, loved the idea and set right to work creating the strips to make it happen.

Materials:

templates

scissors

glue

colored pencils or crayons

pencil

Creating the Calendar Scroll Strips:

Print enough templates for each student (enough for 52 weeks).

Decide where you are going to start. We started at the beginning of this year which was Wednesday, January 1, 2014. Have students find the correct day of the week, put the number 1 and the name of the month (January) in the box. Then have them number to 31 and stop.

Once the month is completely numbered, have the students color the whole month one color. Be sure they do not color in the space below the boxes. That space is for later.

Here is what two complete months would look like:

After completing the first two months, students cut out the strips and glue them together.

The calendar scroll becomes quite long as you can imagine and the longer it gets, the more the first graders like it!

To help a bit with keeping the calendars managable, we glued them onto 1/2 of a toilet paper tube. This made rolling them up and storing them much easier!

The final step was to add the seasons. The white strip that runs the length of the entire calendar is for the seasons. As a class, we “researched” when the beginning and ending of each season is for 2014. We then took our calendars outside, laid them out on the ground and worked in partners to mark the beginning and ending dates for each season on the calendars and to color them appropriately.

Our calendars were then done and ready to take home. Suggestion for next year? I plan to create our calendar scroll throughout the months. Each month when we create our first grade calendar, the students will add the same month to their scroll. This way it won’t be such a big undertaking a one time and the discussions will be more timely.

This calendar strips activity is available at the following link:

Creating a Calendar Scroll from BMTM

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Looking for other ideas about calendars?

Days of the Week Slide

Making a Monthly Calendar

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