Beyond Calendar

If you are a consumer of edu-blogs like me, you've probably already seen this post on the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics blog from January.  Basically, the author calls into question many of the practices we routinely repeat during calendar time.  During my 25 years in kindergarten, I mixed and remixed.  I flipped and flopped by routines trying to increase engagement and target key skills.  We tried high tech.  We tried low tech.  We practically turned it into a full scale musical production in a attempt to get it right! 

Nothing seemed to be exactly the right thing to keep student engagement high.  The days of the week are only SO exciting and WHY are we so concerned with tracking them after all?  Oh, how I wish I'd had access to THIS mission while in MY classroom.  It's so mathematically juicy!

So, if your class has lost its passion for counting up the days in school, why not re-purpose those counters for this mission.  Your students will have a REAL and IMPORTANT reason for working with numbers!