My first year teaching first grade I had the traditional bulletin board calendar like a lot of teachers still have. I hated it. I hated the little straws and cubes and changing everything out and the whole thing. I think calendar time is a very important part of the school day (and a big portion of my required math time) so I didn’t want to/couldn’t just abandon it completely. I was fortunate to get a SmartBoard the second half of my first year teaching and once I got it I began looking for a SmartBoard based calendar math file to use. I found several great ones online but none of them really fit my needs or my grade level standards. I decided to create my own!
I previously posted about my Calendar Math routine here but I will run down it again.
I do Calendar Math first thing in the morning. The students come in, put their things away, and sit on the carpet for Calendar Math. (If I’m using an attendance check-in on the SmartBoard I have that up and they check-in and then sit on the carpet.)(Sometimes we do a bit of morning work before calendar math.) I’ve done Calendar Math at different times of the day before but to me it just makes the most sense to do it first thing since we discuss the date and the day of the week. I think it’s important for students to know about the day at the beginning of the day and not half way through the day.
Before the actual calendar math, we go over our school/classroom rules, school expectations, and bus expectations. These are not included in my calendar math files for sale, but you could easily add them for yourself.
My school adopted the whole brain teaching rules last school year to provide consistency among grade levels and the entire school. I added the posters I made to the first page of my calendar math. You tap a faded out rule and it fades in and we recite the rule together with gestures. (The posters are available for free here.)
Here are our school wide PBIS expectations we read every day.
Here are our district PBIS bus expectations.
Morning Message – I added a page with handwriting lines at the beginning of my calendar math so I can add a morning message to my students. I use this space to go over writing sentences, grammar, spelling words, etc.
Spell the Month Song – Every day we sing our month of the year song. The songs help the students learn how to spell the name of the month. Each song is different. I found the songs in various places on the internet. Some I tweaked and a couple I wrote myself. The kids love learning a new song every month. At the beginning of the month when I sing and introduce the song they’re always like, “That’s a hard song! We can’t sing that!” But after a couple of days they’re pros.
What’s the Date? – After adding the date to the monthly calendar we then discuss yesterday, today, and tomorrow. I also refer to this as before and after because my students get that mixed up a lot. We also write the date with hyphens and slashes.
Days in School – We
Pattern of the Day – Students tap the dice and it tells them what sort of pattern to make (AB, ABC, etc.). They use the images to make a pattern. The kids LOVE seeing what the new pictures will be for the month.
Odd and Even song (again, not sure where these originally came from. I’ve found them in a couple of places). We sing this one every day too.
Telling time – students write the digital and analog times they are told. We start off with time to the hour, then half hour, and later we go over elapsed time. The picture is from my May calendar math file. I re-did the clocks to make them look more like the type of clocks students see on the MAP assessment.
Comparing Numbers – Students tap random number generators. They decide if the number is greater than, less than, or equal to the other number and choose the correct symbol and circle the correct phrase. If you tap the alligator, you might get a surprise! (He growls!)
Fact Families – I give the students 3 numbers and they write the addition and subtraction sentences for the fact family. Later on in the year I fill in some of the blanks and the students have to fill in the missing numbers. (This is something they have to do on the MAP assessment.)
Money Poems – Students tap beside a coin and the money poem appears.
I have enough pages/things to do so that every student gets a turn (some get two turns). I use popsicle sticks to draw names at random. (Sometimes it’s not so “random.” If I get to a page with a skill that I know someone is struggling with I call that person and pretend I got their stick. One time I had this student move in later in the year and the school she came from had not taught fact families yet and we already had. I had her do the fact family page every day until she got it. The whole class would encourage her and cheer her on when she did it correctly. It was great!)
The students LOVE Calendar Math and if we aren’t able to get to it for some reason (assemblies, etc.) they get upset and beg for us to do it at a different time.
TIP! Here’s a GREAT tip for using a SmartBoard if you didn’t already know. Selecting and dragging items around on a SmartBoard can be tricky for little ones. There’s nothing more annoying then hearing those little fingers squeak all over the board. Have them use a tennis ball instead! Touch the tennis ball (in the picture above the students are using the little balls that go on the legs of our chairs) to the SmartBoard and move items around with ease!
If you’d like to try out my calendar math, August is free on my Teachers Pay Teachers and Teachers Notebook stores. All of the other 11 months are available to purchase. Don’t have a SmartBoard but do have a projector? You can download the SmartNotebook Interactive Viewer and STILL use my calendar math!