Description

What our Calendar and Dates lesson plan includes

Lesson Objectives and Overview: Calendar and Dates teaches students how to use and interpret calendars, as well as how to read and write dates. Students will learn about the relationship between days, weeks, months, and years. They will also learn about the days of the week, the names of the months, and even what a leap year is! As a part of this lesson, students will create a personal yearly calendar with important dates and events from their life. This lesson is for students in 1st grade, 2nd grade, and 3rd grade.

Classroom Procedure

Every lesson plan provides you with a classroom procedure page that outlines a step-by-step guide to follow. You do not have to follow the guide exactly. The guide helps you organize the lesson and details when to hand out worksheets. It also lists information in the blue box that you might find useful. You will find the lesson objectives, state standards, and number of class sessions the lesson should take to complete in this area. In addition, it describes the supplies you will need as well as what and how you need to prepare beforehand. For this lesson, the supplies needed include the handouts, colored pencils, scissors, magazines or other image sources, and glue. To prepare for this lesson ahead of time, you can gather all of the supplies, find a full page year calendar for the activity, and copy the handouts.

Options for Lesson

Included with this lesson is an “Options for Lesson” section that lists a number of suggestions for activities to add to the lesson or substitutions for the ones already in the lesson. One option is to use this lesson to help students write ordinal numbers. You may also include a discussion of the reason that we have leap years, including the science behind using the earth and moon’s movement for calendars. You can also introduce other calendars that have been used throughout history, like the lunar calendar. Finally, you can give students a spelling test that includes the months and days.

Teacher Notes

The teacher notes page includes a paragraph with additional guidelines and things to think about as you begin to plan your lesson. This page notes that it’s a good idea to start teaching students about months and days of the week as the school year continues, noting as each month starts and ends. This will help students start to pay attention to months and dates. You can also pair this lesson with other lessons about time. This page also includes lines that you can use to add your own notes as you’re preparing for this lesson.

CALENDAR AND DATES LESSON PLAN CONTENT PAGES

Calendars and Dates

This lesson includes two content pages. The first section, Calendars and Dates, describes to students what calendars and dates are and how they are used. Students will learn that calendars are very important. They allow people to plan events and visits, attend events, and remember dates for various things like vacations. Calendars are simply charts that show the different days of the year. There are many types of calendars – yearly, monthly, weekly, and daily. These are all used for different purposes.

During this section, students will learn all about how different units of time – days, weeks, months, and years – are related to each other. They are taught, for example, that a week is made up of seven days, a month is four weeks, and so on. Included in this section is a “calendar helper” box that lists the amount of time for each of these units. Students will also learn about leap years. A leap year happens every four years, and means that that year has 366 days instead of the usual 365. February has a day added to it, so in leap years, February has 29 days instead of the normal 28.

Next, students will learn about the order of the days of the week and which days are weekdays and which are weekends. They also learn about the many different ways people can write dates. For example, you can write a date as January 3, 2020; 01/03/2020; 1/3/20; 1-3-2020; or 1-3-20. The way that you write dates is generally just personal preference, but all of these ways of writing dates has the month first (January or 1), the day next (3), and the year last (20 or 2020).

Parts of a Calendar

The next section of this lesson breaks down the different parts of a calendar. It notes some important things to know when reading a calendar. All monthly calendars have the name of the month listed at the top of the page, and includes a different square for every day in that month. It also notes that sometimes, a week includes parts of two different months. Calendars often abbreviate the days of the week to take up less space. They might write “Sun” instead of  “Sunday,” for example.

Students will also learn that there are many dates that people in the United States celebrate every year and what those dates are. January 1st is New Year’s Day, February 14th is Valentine’s Day, Memorial Day happens in May, and so on. It also notes that each student will have their own important holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, and more, that happen every year and that calendars are a great way to keep up with these important events!

Key Terms

Here is a list of the vocabulary words students will learn in this lesson plan:

• Calendar: a chart showing the different days of the year
• Year: a unit of time that lasts for 365 days (366 days during a leap year)
• Leap year: happens every four years; a year that has 366 days instead of 365
• Month: a unit of time which contains 28, 29, 30, or 31 days, depending on the month, with each month called a different name; there are 12 months in a year
• Week: a time period that lasts for seven days, with each day also called a different name; there are 52 weeks in a year
• Day: a time period that lasts for 24 hours; seven days make up one week
• Weekdays: Monday through Friday
• Weekends: Saturday and Sunday

CALENDAR AND DATES LESSON PLAN WORKSHEETS

The Calendar and Dates lesson plan includes three worksheets: an activity worksheet, a practice worksheet, and a homework assignment. You can refer to the guide on the classroom procedure page to determine when to hand out each worksheet.

IMPORTANT DATES ACTIVITY WORKSHEET

For this activity, students create a one-year calendar for the current year. They must list at least 25 specials events on that calendar. These special events include important family dates, such as birthdays and anniversaries, and other important events such as vacations and religious days. their finished calendar will include a separate page for each month, with 12 total, and a front cover. They’ll use drawings, images, and other decorations to embellish their calendar, which they will share with a partner in their class. Students can work in pairs for this activity, though they will need to create their own calendars.

USE THE CALENDAR PRACTICE WORKSHEET

The practice worksheet asks students to use the provided calendar to answer each question listed. Some of these questions include “How many total days are in the month?” and “What day will it be on the first day of the next month?.” Students will use what they’ve learned during this lesson to complete this worksheet.

CALENDAR AND DATES HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT

For this homework assignment, students will complete a few different exercises. First, they will look at a list of numbers, dates, and more, and tell the meaning of each as they relate to a calendar. For example, they will have to describe how “28 through 31” and “January 1” relate to calendars. Next, they unscramble the months and days found on a calendar. Finally, they will answer a few questions related to calendars, such as “Which months have 30 days?.”

Worksheet Answer Keys

This lesson plan includes answer keys for the practice worksheet and the homework assignment. No answer key is provided for the activity worksheet as every student’s calendar will look different and include different events. If you choose to administer the lesson pages to your students via PDF, you will need to save a new file that omits these pages. Otherwise, you can simply print out the applicable pages and keep these as reference for yourself when grading assignments.