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Our New Calendar Board with Free Printables

It’s been a long time since we’ve done calendar time and I miss it.  Our last calendar was ruined in a move and we just haven’t put the time into remaking it.

I knew when we started this school year that I wanted to make sure we had our calendar ready.  I have spent about a month brainstorming what I wanted to include and how I would make sure we hit something for each of the boys, and include all of them on as many tasks as possible.

Calendar Board with Printables

 

Baloo is going into 2nd, Royal is doing preK, and Logan is a toddler, so we have a decent spread of abilities and needs.  Baloo needs more help with the math side, and Royal is working mostly on letters.  I wrote down everything we wanted to accomplish, figured out ways to combine as much as possible, and set to work.

Here is our new calendar for the 2013/2014 year!

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Everything on this page will be available for download, and most of it right away.

This is the calendar part.  I havent finished sewing it yet, but I will be using this tutorial again from All Our Days.  This is one of those pocket charts from the Target One Spot…I haven’t seen them there this year yet, but fingers crossed!!
I have themes planned out for the next 12 months.  Each month the number cards will feature a different pattern.  There will also be daily cards with fun facts/info about the theme (similar to the Connections Cards from 1+1+1=1 but these are meant for a lower elementary or even younger age group).  August is Fruits and Veggies and it’s an ABAB pattern.
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Directly under that we have our ‘Today is…’ chart and our things of the day.  I’ve chosen to do state of the day, current moon phase, shape of the day, color of the day, animal of the week (yes it says day, we changed our minds last minute) and President of the week.  Coming next week you’ll see the matching notebooks for the animal of the day, and how we use the state of the day and shape of the day in our Calendar notebooks.  I was inspired to do the Phase of the Moon from Counting Coconuts.  The boys have always enjoyed spotting the moon each day so I thought it would be a fun addition!
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My personal favorite part of calendar time is the songs.  Royal learned to spell his name at around 20 months sing we sang it every day.  He would tell everyone how to spell his name – he was so proud!  There are 5 songs covering days of the week, months of the year, name, good morning, and today is…”

Directly below the songs I have a number chart.  As I said, Baloo is working a lot of math and I wanted to incorporate a number of the day.  He’s going into 2nd grade, so I wanted 3 digit numbers.  There are 3 rings each with the numbers 0-9.  Every day each boy takes one of the rings and chooses a number and thus makes our number of the day.  Then we use the sticks (small dowel rods from Micheals.Similar to these from Amazon) and count out the hundreds, tens, and ones.  I have the color of the numbers on the rings match the words on the pockets.
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On the opposite side is our letter of the week.  This goes along with whatever Royal is working on.  Most times we do one letter a week, but we would repeat if necessary.  Every day Royal traces the letter using whatever the color of the day is.  Then I have 5 images for each letter and we color one each day and then tape/glue it to the letter.
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Then comes the weather.  The weather where we live rarely changes, so I didn’t want to do a 5 day spread.  We just do the current weather.  We will be recording the weather every day for the month in our Calendar notebooks, however.
Below that we record the temperature.  Again, our temperature just doesn’t vary much, so I added in high and low.  We are going to be studying Continents soon and I might add in another form so we can record the temperatures on other continents as well.

Under that we have our Spanish word of the day and our sight word of the day.  We are doing color words based on the color of the day for Spanish, and for sight words we are working through the dolch word list.  Since there are 220 dolch sight words I didn’t feel like printing them out Smile  I just write it down in the morning!
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Our Calendar notebook is very much intertwined with the board, but I just don’t have it ready to download yet.  I’m hoping to have it up and ready on Monday.  There will be a lower elementary version, preK, and toddler!

 

Download the Calendar Board Printables here!

 

I’ve tried to add everything we used to this widget to at least give everyone a visual.  Most of these are the exact brand and type.  Check your local stores and prices, because I’ve often found that amazon doesn’t have the best deal on office supplies especially at back-to-school time.  I didn’t even bother putting to tri-fold foam board on there because on amazon they were $80+!  Many stores will have them on sale now for $3-$4.

Also, the Purple Cow laminator in amazing, but we got it for $9 with 100 laminating pouches at Costco.  It’s just $24 on Amazon which is a great deal, but if you can get to Costo I highly recommend it.  We’ve also used the Scotch brand and I loved that one too (some little boy put a quarter in mine and I haven’t been able to get it out…)

 

 

Lastly, there are a few other calendar board systems from other bloggers and they are amazing.  I have to mention them here!
1+1+1=1
Homeschool Creations
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39 Comments

  1. I’m having trouble downloading the calendar. It says page not found. LOVE your ideas!! Can’t wait to use them!

    1. Yes, I’ll have August out next week. And each month thereafter should be out around the 15th of the month before 🙂

  2. We use coffee stir-sticks/straws to practice place value. We bundle groups of 10 with hairties and groups of 100 with a rubberband. We’ve never gone past 200, so I don’t know how that would work out in the chart.
    Thank you for sharing your great calendar with us.

    1. I initially wanted to group the sticks together, but 9 groups of 10 wouldn’t fit, and 9 groups of 100 surely wouldn’t fit! I would love the visual of that though!

  3. I tried downloading this. First of all it didn’t open up. Second of all, my anti virus picked this up as a virus:-(

    1. Are you making sure to click the links at the bottom of the page and not the ads? It’s just a pdf file 🙂

  4. Thanks so much for sharing! Will you be posting the calendar month/day/number printables once you get them finished?

  5. Thanks for these printables! Will you have the second half of the letter of the week printables available?

    1. Yes I will, hopefully soon! I wanted to have them up Friday but it didn’t happen. I’m about halfway through the 2nd set now

  6. This is fantastic. My daughter will be working on Saxon Math 1 this year, and I plan on adapting the “Meeting Book” portion of the lesson to this board. Thank you so much for sharing!

  7. I always loved doing calendar activities as a Montessori teacher and as a homeschooler. Thanks so much for sharing your printables. I really appreciate all the work you do and how generous you are, Erin! I featured your calendar board printables as the Free Printable(s) of the Day at the Living Montessori Now Facebook page and on Pinterest.

  8. These are great! Thank you for sharing! I did notice that in the letter of the week pages, for Z there is a picture of a zipper and the word muffin. 🙂

  9. I love the idea of doing this on a tri-fold board. We have quite a few windows, so not a lot of space to hang things on the wall. Could you tell me what the font is that you used for the “_____ of the day/week”? I’d like to make a couple of other ones for my kids that match up. Thanks so much for all your freebies!! 🙂

        1. I also meant to say, when I print page 8, Millard Fillmore’s photo doesn’t print for some reason. The rest are fine, but he’s missing and I can’t figure out how to get him to print.

  10. Thank you so much for the printables! This will be my first year homeschooling my daughter and I know the calendar will be a big hit! Did you need to use a special glue to stick the laminated paper onto the board?

    1. I hot glued ours. I’ve used plain Elmers glue in the past and it was fine. The hot glue seems to be pretty strong though, so far at least!

  11. When I print page 8, Millard Fillmore’s photo doesn’t print for some reason. The rest are fine, but he’s missing and I can’t figure out how to get him to print. Any ideas? 🙂

  12. Hi – do you laminate the place value holder cards? I am making the calendar now and I would think that it would be hard to fold them once they are laminated?

    1. The pockets for the sticks? I didn’t laminate the pockets. I did laminate the cards with the numbers though

  13. Finally getting my calendar set up. How do you store all of the ____ of the day pieces? Envelopes and baggies on the back is not working. I tend to lose things andd would really like to avoid that. Thank you for sharing so much of your calendar.

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