Oh my, how they do go by. This winter (that kind of isn't) has been flying by. My personal time has been flying by as well, especially as I send much of my computer time lately working on winter carnival things at Homespun Waldorf. The first week was so much fun to prep and read.
For school this month Jack and Lucy both had a calendar/time block, with different projects and learning for each. I'll share more about Jack's month later (his favorite was making a water clock!). I told the story of the Twelve Months, we read seasonal book about the turning of the year and each kid memorized a poem. (I always fee like I have to add the caveat "And of course we did much more!")
With my help, Lucy made a perpetual calendar that we've added to our new morning routine. She's quite proud of it and it came together easier than I thought it would.
I was ready for her (and Jack for that matter!) to have a little more understanding of the order of the days. Lucy wanted to be able to see when fun events were coming (like birthdays and gymnastics meets). We also added a little daily weather piece.
First Lucy painted a very large sheet of watercolor paper. She enjoyed figuring out how many different colors she could make out of the three she had available.
I planned and penciled out the calendar grid. Each square is about 2.25 inches - I wanted the cut out squares to be 2 inches. I cut and pasted little days of the week tabs to put above each column.
I cut out plain pieces of watercolor paper (as in white and unpainted) for the month name banner on the top of the calendar. Lucy wrote the name of the month and decorated it appropriately. She's done three to this point and plans on doing a new month every week or two. At this time we also figured out what type of weather pictures we would need to reflect our weather. We decided we needed two images most days. Cold and sunny, rainy and warm, etc. I cut more 2 inch blank squares and she designed the pictures.
Next Lucy and I traced and cut plenty of 2 inch squares from watercolor paintings. (Yes! Another use for those STACKS of paintings!) She then numbered each square from 1-31.
I also cut out some blank squares. She used these to mark special events and drew a few birthday and holiday ones. I also cut the longer labels for the changing days of the week that you can see in the picture above. She wrote the days of the week on these.
Several of the items change daily (day of the week and weather) and everything changes monthly so I decided velcro was probably the best option for affixing everything. Wow, though, those little tabs are expensive! I bought one pack and cut each tab up into four.
These little bits of velcro are totally adequate for the job. Lucy helped me peel and stick everything, and we were done. Its the type of project that when I imagined it seemed a bit overwhelming and time consuming, but came together much faster than I thought it would. We finished it in a few days.
Lucy proudly counted out the days till her next gymnastics meet today so that she could give an update to her grandma.
