#Starfall calendar september 2020 full

Young children can understand the concepts of before and after, but not the days of the week. There is a really great article written about this “calendar hot topic” from the National Association for the Education of Young Children called Calendar Time for Young Children: Good Intentions Gone Awry.Īccording to this article, it all comes down to the fact that calendar time for preschoolers and even kindergarteners is not meaningful. I’m not the only one questioning this practice though. So why was I dragging these concepts through circle time when they would just “click” one day? Calendar Time: Good Intentions Gone Awry by Lilian Katz I would support them where they are at and keep encouraging their development until the time was right for them. I would never try to have a five-month-old who is just sitting up try to learn to walk.

Since I don’t think that learning should feel like pulling teeth, I took a step back and gave it some extra perspective. Right? We were all in the same room I thought!?!”

#Starfall calendar september 2020 full

Learning is a joyful experience where we come alongside a child’s interests and support them in that.īut there were times when I felt like calendar was full of lots of blank stares, long, silent pauses, and me saying to myself, “We just said this yesterday. I would rather teach a child when they are ready or in a way that is exciting for them.

To me it meant that I was just wasting a lot of my time and their time. This certainly does not mean that engaging in calendar activities is wrong or that it is damaging children. We are talking years for kiddos who go less than Monday through Friday. This means that it would take roughly a year and a half of doing calendar time for the concept to sink in.Īnd that is if they go to school five days a week and the teacher does it every single day. I am going to say it is 350 times (and I know that’s the ballpark). She told us that a four-year-old would have to do calendar hundreds of times (I am really wishing I had written down the exact number now) before they understood it. One of my most dearly revered professors had me on the edge of my seat one class when she was talking about calendar time. I honestly felt completely conflicted within myself, feeling uncertain and confused with the two polar opposite extremes.īut then I had a professor who gave me some perspective that I’ll never forget. Let’s just say no one dared ask for one in their classroom. Well, maybe they would have been a little more understanding. If you were caught with a calendar, you would be beheaded by lunch… On the opposite spectrum, I worked for an organization where calendar time was taboo.

Write out the date in full, with the year.

I have worked at five different schools in my 17 years of working in ECE, and calendar looks different depending on what each school’s philosophy is.Īt a couple of the preschools I have been in, as well as schools that I observed while getting my degree, they did this every day. One of the activities that kept popping up on my radar is calendar time. Learning needs to be meaningful, and that means that I need to be constantly assessing my own approaches and methods. I have my preschoolers for a short time before they head off to kindergarten, and I want to make sure that I am making the most of each minute I have with them. I try to live each day with the philosophy “work smarter, not harder.” In the same way, I try to teach according to the same motto. But is calendar time truly necessary? In my own classroom, calendar time was a struggle for years until I began to dig deeper and research it. Calendar time is a daily part of many preschool programs and classrooms.