Throwback Thursday & Pin It to Win It!

Today I am linking up with Cara over at The First Grade Parade for a little Throwback Thursday! I am coming up on my first blogiversary, but I really haven't blogged very much. I hope to do much better this year and share more about what we are learning in kindergarten. With that being said, I decided to share my calendar time again and how we use Calendar Notebooks and the SMART board. I felt the need to share this particular post because I just revamped my Calendar Notebook file and maybe teachers are looking for a different approach to their calendar time this year.

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Originally posted on April 25, 2013.

I don't know if you have a SMART board or not, but I love mine and we use it all day long. I started the year off with doing calendar the "old fashioned" way, but quickly decided to switch over to doing it on the SMART board. I still have a calendar posted in the room because I think that's important, but for our calendar routine, my students are much more engaged when we use the SMART board. Then I realized that we started to lose engagement since only a few students were interacting with it. I decided it was time to make a Calendar Notebook to keep everyone busy and engaged throughout all of calendar time. Although we've been using this since the beginning of second semester, I decided I should go ahead and blog about it since it works nicely in our class. If you like the idea of a Calendar Notebook and would like to incorporate it into your calendar time, you might be interested in mine that you see in this post. Click here to take you to the product on TpT. I'll admit, this was one of my first products and it has been a work in progress. I plan on adding pages and organizing it better over the summer, so if you buy it now you will be able to download the update again later at no extra cost! :)

When we first come to the carpet, we fill in the next date on our calendar....

...and fill out this page in our Calendar Notebooks including the day of the week, month, date, & year. You can also see we have begun our countdown to the end of school! 19 DAYS! WOW!!

Before we move to the next slide, they peek out the window and draw the weather they see in their window in their notebook.

Then we go to the next slide and sing our days of the week and identify yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Before turning to the ten frames page, I have the calendar helper add a dot to our ten frames and then we count by tens together and write the number of days we've been in school.

To eliminate too many page turns, it works better to completely finish that first page and then turn to the ten frames and add our own dot.

Next we find the number on our hundreds chart and count by tens off decade to the number of days we've been in school. You could also count by ones to that number which we did earlier in the year.

We then turn to the back of our notebook to the weather graph. Our calendar helper steps out our door to check the weather and then graphs it. We talk about how to read a graph, how many more, how many less, etc. with the graph. As you can see, we've had a lot of variety in our April weather!!

The next part of our calendar time that I will add to the pack this summer is a "What's the Number" page. It is a great way to help students truly understand numbers in many different ways. At the beginning of the year, I kept it to numbers under 10, but now we are doing teen numbers too! We use a random number generator and spit out the number. Then the calendar helper gets to call on friends (boy-girl-boy-girl) to come up and complete the steps on the board. We fill in the ten frame(s), write equal to, less than, greater than, and decompose the number. These kids have got it down pat by now and I'm so proud of them! :)

The next part is one of their favorites (specifically the balloon pop!). We review our sight words with either a random word chooser...

or the balloon pop game!

They love throwing this little guy at the board and aiming for the balloons. It makes for a fun and exciting review!

The last slide isn't too pretty, but it has been effective. We roll a die and shout out the number that goes with it to make 10. For example, if we roll a 2, we say "2 and 8!"

Well, there you have it! Our calendar routine on the SMART board and using our Calendar Notebooks. Like anything else, it takes a little time to get the students use to the notebook routine, but after a full month with it, they will be pros! I hope this gave you some new ideas and I would love to hear what you do with your calendar time that you love!

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One more thing before you go! I am throwing a PIN IT TO WIN IT on my Facebook page right now!! It will be going on for THREE days, so head on over and post your pin and email address before it ends! Here's a preview of the new product you have a chance to win!