We have been continuing to learn the days of the week and how time passes. To help us, I decided that I wanted a calendar for the girls.
When I looked online for a calendar, I really didn’t like what I found. I hated how so many included all the months and/or days of the week on the front of the calendar. To me that was just tempting the girls to tear them off and play with them. I also felt like having all the options on display made the calendars confusing and wasted a lot of space. And I didn’t like how big some of the calendars were. And some were set up to be specific to one child.
When planning out my calendar, I decided to include the day followed by the date. Then I wanted the weather and feelings included too. My husband designed all the images and templates for me (and you!) to use:
I’ve included the emotion cards in this post here.
I wanted to keep the calendar somewhat small and magnetic since that works well with us. I bought the largest cookie sheet I could find. To do the permanent lettering I used my cricut and vinyl but you could also buy letters to use. I then printed out the changeable pieces on magnetic computer paper. To cut costs you could also skip the magnetic paper and just attach small magnets to the pieces printed on cardstock.
Since I didn’t want the pieces all on display in the front, I decided to store them in 
the back. It was one reason that I used a cookie sheet so that both the front and back would be magnetic. But there are so many pieces trying to stick on the back that I worried they would fall off. I made a backing using velcro and leftover fabric. After cutting it to the size of the tray, I hemmed the top. I then hemmed the sides and sewed the velcro to the sides. Then I hot glued the opposite velcro pieces to the tray. I also hot glued the bottom of the fabric to the base of the tray. This way the fabric makes a pocket protecting the extra pieces that can fold down to allow easy access.
At the start of the day we do calendar time. At the moment we are singing our Days of the Week song that we first learned when doing The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Here again are the words courtesy of Homeschool Share and to the tune of the Addam’s Family:
Days of the week (snap, snap), Days of the week (snap, snap)
Days of the week, days of the week, days of the week (snap, snap)
There’s Sunday and there’s Monday
There’s Tuesday and there’s Wednesday
There’s Thursday and there’s Friday
And then there’s Saturday
Days of the week (snap, snap), Days of the week (snap, snap)
Days of the week, days of the week, days of the week (snap, snap)
If you don’t want to make your own, here are some of the ones I had looked at:
