Time to Make a Calendar

Well I finally decided that we need a calendar for our "classroom."  Decided as in Abbagail's math lessons just got to teaching about calendars and we don't even have one up on our wall right now.  I've been meaning to do it (no, really, I have), but... well, yeah that's about as far as the procrastination excuses get and I realize I'm just putting it off because I've never had any clue what to do.

So - I did my research the past few days in my off time, all 3 minutes of it, and we made a rough draft calendar for our wall.  Here it is.

 Yeah, it isn't gorgeous.  I actually made it from scratch paper we had laying about and a large piece of the leftover paper from our move that was still relatively not crumply. (yes I'm aware that is not a real word - I take it upon myself to invent words as needed since my brain turned to jelly a few years back... coincidentally right around the same time I had my kids and really needed it!)

We have the year, month, days of the week, and all the days of the month on the calendar of course, but I'm also customizing the calendar to fit our specific classroom needs as well.  All my kids already know all their shapes and colors, so I'm not wasting space with a daily or weekly of any of that.  Instead I added a section at the top for showing how to write the day's date, both in civilian and in military form (but me & Bryan disagreed on how military time is written so I have to go look it up now... I could have sworn it was all numbers ddmmyyyy, but he says that it is dd Month (spelled out or abbreviated) yyyy.  So I'll look that up and be adding it - I think it is a nifty little tidbit they should know since they are army brats!  I'll also be adding a line for writing out the entire date (ex: Saturday June 11th, 2011).

In addition to the nifty dates, I also added a small section for our ecosystem of the month with the word and a picture of the ecosystem - like my fancy artwork?  Below the ecosystem is the Animals we are studying, I'll add a picture of each additional animal as we start learning about it (so you can see the frog from last week and the duck & goose picture from this week).

Below the Ecosystem items there is our weather chart.  I had the girls look outside and tell me what the weather is like.  Honestly we probably only need 2 cards in this little pocket - cloudy and raining.  You can see from the picture - we lucked out today! It is only cloudy.  I'm sort of kidding, we get partly cloudy days too...  ;)

That is our calendar for now, but I'll be adding more as we add more lessons to our school week.  I'm getting into the groove of the ecosystem thing, so we might add some geography and/or history in the coming months.  I might also make a mini-board for each of the girls to chronicle what they are learning in which area - Serenity and Tahlia are each learning letters, so I could put their letter of the week up next to their desks, and their number of the week.  We'll see.