Ways that using an interactive calendar for kids helps boost learning
Adopting a collaborative scheduling and teaching calendar in the classroom is almost a must-do in our current education system. These kinds of calendars do a lot to help teach kids a number of skills they will need to possess as they develop and go further in school.
There are literally hundreds of different calendars you can use in order to teach children how to keep track of a variety of special days and Holidays. The also help develop the concept of days, weeks and month, and help track the just the passage of time.
Being able to know what day of the week it is, what time of day it is and what month it is are all skills that adults take for granted. We all learn these skills while we are in grade school and we all have it ingrained in some degree or another.
As with all teaching techniques for younger children, it simply works better to get them to remember what they are being taught if you can actually make it fun and interesting. Telling a six year old that July comes after June and August comes after July isn’t going to sink in, if the only thing you do is tell them those facts. Interactive calendars can help to ingrain this information because they can actually write the months on the calendar. This is sort of like practice for remembering what months go in what order every time they fill their calendar out.
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You can also put together a calendar that will allow them to learn the months and how many days are in those months while they are decorating their own calendars. If you allow them to decorate their calendars the way they want, then you are giving them “ownership” of their calendars and this too will work well in making sure that the information you want them to soak up, will indeed be soaked up.
If you want children to have a real interest in learning something as mundane as what month follows another you simply need to find a way to make it interesting and combining the information with something they do find interesting like coloring or drawing works well.
Once you think you have children gaining a basic understanding of the months you can start working with them on how many days of the week are actually in a particular month and what sort of days stand out as Holidays and important dates.
Obviously all the kids will have heard of Thanksgiving and Christmas and Halloween but they may not know when those days actually occur. Most kids will remember that the weather is getting colder when Halloween rolls around, but they won’t be able to name the day or the month. You can help the kids along by using interactive calendars that are a bit bigger, perhaps something you can hang on the wall. You can then get some special stickers and have the kids put the Holiday on the right day of the right month.
You can also track the birthdays of the kids in the class using these calendars, have the kids put their own birthdays up on the calendar or point out when a date is coming up so that they understand how the year as a whole and a calendar in particular actually works.
As the children get older you can use these types of calendars to track some of the more obscure national holidays that aren’t necessarily celebrated big at home like President’s Day, MLK Day and similar days that are accompanied by excellent social studies and history discussions.
As long as you are meticulous in your usage, you will see the kids starting to pick up the information quite well.