The calendar as a timeline
The purpose of this resource is to provide suggestions to whānau about how they can support their children with their mathematics learning through the use of a calendar.
About this resource
This section provides some ideas for how you can raise awareness and share mathematics using everyday experiences and resources found around your home. It includes ideas for supporting your children’s learning in all areas of mathematics: geometry, measurement, statistics, algebra, and number.
This page provides suggestions as to how whānau can support the learning of time and calendars at home.
The calendar as a timeline
1.
A year-long stretch: Many children don’t get the idea of the year as a big time line. You can buy a calendar from a discount store, cut it up, and put all the months up on the bedroom wall in order from January to December as a long strip. It is important to see the whole year as one long strip. This helps to develop the idea of a year being a set of 12 months and there being about 4 weeks in each month.
As they cross off the days, weeks, or months, ask them to think about the fractions related to the year:
- When will it be half over?
- Are we a quarter of the way through the year?
- About when will we be 2/3 of the way through?
- When do the seasons change?
- What are the summer months?
2.
New month: As a new month begins, ask your child to look at what is coming up and talk about any planning that needs to be done, like remembering to make cards or cakes. Use this as a time to go over which months have gone by and which are coming up. Stress the order of the names and how much of the year is left.
If your child is interested, you can find out about the phases of the moon and many calendars indicate the dates for new and full moons. Then watch for these events in the sky at night. This helps to develop the concept of time being related to natural things such as the revolution of the planet (day and night) and the orbits of the moon and the Earth.
3.
This week: Use a small whiteboard and divide it into 7 boxes. Each Sunday night, ask your child to help with filling in the things that are coming up this week and to put the reminders in the right boxes: lunch money, mufti day, hockey practice, Nan’s birthday, raffle tickets, church choir practice etc.
This is also an opportunity to include and record the time for certain events, such as “Rugby 10 AM”, “Pick up Nan at Doctor’s 2:30”. Questions like, "Is that the afternoon or the morning?" help to develop a sense of clock time.
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