Concept Week #4: Calendars

Ugh, I have to say that as glad as I am that we did this for a Concept Week it was painful.  Part of the problem was settling into a new schoolwork schedule.  Another problem was all the house work going on at the same time.  Plus everyone started to get sick right towards the end.  But the biggest problem of all was I made too many worksheets.  After day two (both day one and two we only did half of the calendar schoolwork for each day) Optimus Prime fully understood the calendar and was officially bored.  After day three, where we tried to catch up but didn't really succeed, Bumblebee pretty much had it down.  Then I was stuck with three and a half days of calendar sheets that they didn't want to do and I didn't want to just throw out.  So we did them anyway, which meant a lot of whining, which meant we only did a few sheets at a time, which meant it got dragged out longer than it should have, which meant even more whining...

You can see how this is shaping up, right?

However, we survived, and they now fully understand calendars.  They also never want to look at another one again, but they understand them.

I'll consider it a win.

The sheets were pretty cool, actually, and for right now you can find them here.  This link might not be good forever, though, so I will tell you that they came from education.com - if you go there and search for calendar worksheets CURRENT ones will pop up.  They only keep them up for two years, then they pull them down and put up new ones.  So as of this exact moment you can only get September 2011 - September 2013.  Next month September 2011 will be pulled down and October 2013 will go up.  The link is for all the 2012 calendars, so like I said it might not be good forever.

For our project I printed up a calendar for October and November, also from education.com.  They have a neat set called "Create a Calendar" where you print up blank calendars for the year and fill them in.  I had them each take a month and fill in our schedule for the month with pictures.  So we now have football practice, holidays, and other events mapped out for the next two months.

For a book I had to get creative.  I could not seem to find a kids book that dealt with calendars.  I found seasons books, but that did me no good, especially since we already own one of those and I'm using it for our next Concept Week.  I did find a book on amazon.com called "The Berenstain Bears The Whole Year Through: With Earth Saver Tips and Things to Do for Each and Every Month of the Year."  I was intrigued, however there was no photo up to show me what the product looked like, and no reviews or descriptions up either.  And for a price tag of $20-689 (yes, you read that right) I wasn't even remotely interested in finding out how the book was.  So I had to order "The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Pressure" by Stan and Jan Berenstain and hope it was good enough.  Since the book did kind of deal with calendars it worked out okay.  The plot was the Bear Family was trying to cram too much stuff into their schedule, which was causing them stress.  I was able to tie the book into our lesson by pointing out how we use calendars to properly schedule our time so we can make sure we have the time to do the things we need to do (like schoolwork) and the things we like doing (like football).

So it worked out in the end.