Calendar Time: Teaching Patterns

Calendar time is one of my girl's most favorite parts of the day... and it happens everyday.

From my experience in public education, kids thrive in structured environments where they know what to expect, feel safe, and know where things are that they can have access to. 

We start our Mother Goose Time the same way everyday... with the Calendar and our brief circle time activities which could be a song or dance.  

The first thing I do is get my board ready the night before.  I remove the weather we had up, the day cloud and I hide Mother Goose somewhere in my house.

The board looks like this and you can find out more about it here:

Our school time mostly takes place after her nap, so if I forgot to hide Mother Goose the night before while she was asleep in bed, I can always hide it during nap time.  After Sweet Pea's nap (hence the pajamas in just about all of my posts), we go straight to do our Calendar Time.

One of the awesome things Mother Goose Time does with their calendar is teach PATTERNS with color!  Last month, in October, the cards were colored yellow and green and the pattern was aabb 

(2 yellow, 2 green).  This month, the calendar has 3 colors (purple, green, and blue),

 and the pattern is abc.

Sweet Pea is just now grasping that there is a pattern going on, and so each day before I give her the number card, I ask her to guess what color it is.  We review before she guesses, and I point to the cards saying, "Look, our pattern is purple, green, blue, purple, green, blue... What comes after purple? What color do you think is next?"  Sometimes she gets it right, sometimes she gets it wrong.  But I am proud of her picking a color that is there and not something like "orange."

She then places her number on the next day (great fine motor skill practice), and I sing her our little daily song to the tune of  "Faire Jacques" aka "Are You Sleeping?"

 I recorded it in a video along with our weather time below. 

I recorded that video at the end of last month (October), and you can see that Mother Goose was already in her nest.  This month, November, I have been much more diligent about hiding Mother Goose the night before or during her nap. 

Once we finish our weather I will say, "Oh my goodness! Look!  Mother Goose is out of her nest!  She must be hiding in _____(room).  Can you find her and put her back in the nest?"

So we go on a hunt for Mother Goose.

    

Sweet Pea will find Mother Goose and then go and place her in the nest.  Sometimes Mother Goose is sitting up, but sometimes Sweet Pea says, "Night Night" and lays Mother Goose down in her nest... as seen below.  You can barely make out her tail feathers and beak.

I wish all those calendars I bought for my classroom a few years ago were as good as this one.  I just love that it is more than numbers and days of the week... it's the perfect place to teach PATTERNS too, and Mother Goose Time does a great job implementing an new one each month!