Learning Kindergarten Skills with a Calendar

While the ways in which kindergarten skills will be taught to kids varies from class to class throughout the country, there are methods that are commonly seen in most kindergarten classes. One of the tried and true ways to teach important kindergarten skills is with the help of a calendar. A calendar is an ideal teaching tool because it incorporates both numbers and letters and makes it easy to work in lesson plans that include reading, math and science.

Different Kindergarten Skills Taught with a Calendar

Many kindergarten teachers begin the day with a lesson related to the calendar. It doesn't take long for 5-year-olds to realize that a calendar is an important part of daily life and learn about days of the week, holidays and other events by focusing daily on the calendar. However, you can expect your child to learn a wide variety of kindergarten skills with the help of a simple calendar:

• Days of the week. Expect your kindergartener to come home fairly soon in the year with a newfound appreciation of what day of the week it is and how many days are left until the weekend, the end of the month or until an anticipated upcoming event or holiday.
• Upper and lowercase letters. One of the important foundations in teaching a child to write is for the child to understand the difference between uppercase and lowercase letters and begin to learn when each is appropriate. Kids will learn that titles for things, like the months of the year for example, begin with an uppercase letter - the same way their name begins with an uppercase letter.
• Counting skills. There is a number of different kindergarten skills in math that can be illustrated with the help of a calendar. Of course, one of the most important is simply identifying numbers - in this case the numbers between 1 and 30, as well as the ability to count beyond 10. In addition to basic counting, other math skills that can be taught with the help of a calendar include the ability to count by multiples of numbers - such as 7 days in a week.
• Weather skills. Other kindergarten skills taught with the help of a calendar include understanding the different seasons of the year and the typical weather that comes with summer and winter, for example. Your kindergartener also will learn about what clothes he or she will be wearing depending on the season of the year and the weather on that particular day.