Lessons by Molly: Free Calendar for 2021 and 2022 School Year

Here is a free school calendar for teachers of young children. It is for the 2021-22 school year. The calendar has black and white text and images. No need for color ink! Each month, the adorable owls are engaged in seasonally appropriate activities. Read on to learn more about using monthly calendars with students in lower elementary grades. Scroll to the end of this post to download the calendar.

Here are five recommendation for using calendars with young children:

1. Avoid calendars that use abbreviations for weeks and months. Calendar concepts do no intermingle well with a lesson on abbreviations. Additionally, some calendars display an incorrect form of the abbreviations. "M" is not an abbreviation for "Monday". "S" is not an abbreviation for "Saturday" OR "Sunday." All caps with no ending period, such as "MON" for Monday, deliver misinformation about abbreviated forms for words.

2. Each date gets its own space on the calendar. The months of any given year consist of full weeks and partial weeks. A monthly calendar grid will require four, five, or six rows to accommodate all dates. The required number of rows (4, 5, or 6) varies from year to year and month to month. However, the print calendar industry often provides five rows no matter how many rows are needed. Some dates end up sharing space on a monthly calendar when there is no row for them. The good news is that there are free, printable calendars that offer a matching number of rows to dates.

3. Use authentic calendars. School calendars that omit Saturdays and Sundays are incomplete. School lunch menus often skip the weekend. The students are not eating breakfast and lunch on the weekend; hence, those days are left off the menu calendar. Children that have learned to read WANT to read their menu calendar. The want to know what is for lunch! What an uncontrived way for them to practice both their reading skills AND calendar skills! The absence of Saturday and Sunday is counterproductive to that learning opportunity. Calendars should represent the whole week and not just the days' students come to school.

4. Avoid calendars that include excess information. Calendar makers got the idea that the blank spaces on a monthly calendar needed to be filled. Their solution was to insert the numerals for the first few days of the previous month or the next month.

5. Use visually engaging calendars. Children love seeing images of animals personified or pictures of children their age involved in various activities. Use attractive calendars with adorable graphics or use ones with colorful photographs.

In closing, if we want children to succeed with calendar skills from the onset, we need to think about a young child's brain. Eliminate calendars that require abstract thinking whenever practical to do so.

Check out the "OWL" Year Long calendar beginning in August 2021 and going through August 2022! Click the image at the bottom of this post to get it!