I like to make use of every opportunities and scenarios as a teaching and learning moments for myself and our kiddos. Whatever tools on hand that might serves the purpose to teach, I will not hesitate to use it. And so happened one fine day, I was looking at this piece of A4 paper with the 2015 calendar printed on it and my 6.5-year-old boy and I had a quick learning session using the calendar.
And this is why I am sharing with you guys today, how to use a calendar as a teaching tool for your kiddos. Of course, as a parent, you should know yourself whether your child is capable or mature enough to understand and learn this.
You don't need any fancy smancy calendars. In fact, I just opened up my Microsoft Word, choose the create new document and look for calendar template, choose the ones with nice and easy on the eye layout and printed one out.
Lesson #1 - Name of the Days & Month
Looking at the calendar, just pick one month and teach your child the name of days in a week. If they are old enough to write things, teach them to write the days down.
I also teach our 6.5-year-old boy that calendars we see usually have short name for the days such as M for Monday, T for Tuesday and so on. In addition to that, I also explained to him that some countries in the world treat Sunday as the first day of the week while there are countries that considers Monday as the first day of the week.
You can then proceed to get them to count how many months are there in a year and get them to write down the name of months in a year.
Lesson #2 - Concept of Rows and Columns
Based on the calendar, I proceeded to use a sample month (January 2016 for this example) and write out the days accordingly. I explained to our boy what is row and what is concept and how we make use of the rows and columns to figure out say, how many Mondays in a month, or how many days in a certain week of the month.
Lesson #3 - Concept of Dates, Days, Months in a year
Based on the calendar, I then slowly explained and asked our 6.5-year-old boy to circle dates such as birthdates, special occasions date, writing down the day of certain dates and more.
You can then teach your child to figure out what is the first day of the month, the last date of the month, what day is 15th of the month and so on by referring to the calendar template. Once I can see our boy gaining more confidence, I asked him to circle the months with more than 5 Sundays and so on.
Again, I'm just sharing one of the fun ways to teach your child using a calendar although I need to stress that it differs from child to child. Some of you might also think that a 6.5-year-old boy should not be learning this at this stage. There are children younger than mine who learns way more advance things than him (I just read in a parenting group that a mother shared her 3.5-year-old girl is reading book way faster than she can supply new ones for her, not that I'm pressured to get our boy to be like noooooo...). Again, no right or wrong. This is how we do it our way in our family. I hope my sharing is helpful to you guys!
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