Kindergarten Kids: Calendar Time in Kindergarten

Welcome to the carpet! You'll often hear us asking kids to meet us on the carpet. This is the place where so much learning takes place. Kids have their own special spot on the carpet. They come to the same spot each time they come over to the carpet. We start our time together in the morning by singing a few songs. We sing the "Hello Song" to greet each other. We sing the "SMILE" song to remind us to put on our happy face. Then we have a quiet song to help remember to get our bodies ready for learning.

Next up is the Flag Salute.

We talk about the date, today, tomorrow, and yesterday. We talk about the month and season we are in.

We sing a song about the seven days of the week. Ask your child to sing it for you!

We do lots of work with numbers during our calendar time. As part of our math curriculum, we count the days we've been in school. Every 5th day, we practice counting by 5's. Every 10th day, we practice counting by 10's. At the end of every column of 10, we place a bracket to really help us see this as a TEN. This is an important concept when working with larger numbers. Then we write equations based on the 10's we have. For example, we might write 10+10+3=23. The kids can see on the chart that we have two groups of tens and three extra days crossed off.

Another part of our math curriculum that we practice during calendar time is number flashing. We practice counting numbers with our fingers, but we work on seeing the numbers quickly as a five and a few more. For example, when we count out 8, we'll say 5 and then add three more fingers saying 6, 7, 8. The dots on the number cards also help kids visually see each number.

Here is our money chart, again a place where we count how many days we have been in school, see our number system in 10's, and write equations based on the number we are working on.

We are also learning to write the numbers during our calendar time. So far we have practiced writing the numbers 1 and 2. We have a poem we say for each number that helps us to remember how to properly form the number. We practice writing the number in the air, on the carpet, our friends' backs, and sometimes on white boards on our laps.

Finally, stories and poems are a huge part of our time together on the carpet. Sometimes these things happen during our calendar time. Most days, we'll read several stories and several poems on the carpet. Last week we talked about how listening to stories is one of the first steps to becoming a reader.